US indie pioneer Jim Jarmusch has been pursuing his laconic strain of cinematic hipsterism for 30 years now, so long that he seems as ageless as the blood-sipping characters in his latest film. You thought there was nothing new to add to the vampire genre? So, apparently, did Jarmusch, which is why Only Lovers Left Alive luxuriates in a curious end-of-an-era melancholy, as if he'd set out at once to make the last ever vampire movie and cinema's last ever love story.
The lovers in question are reclusive rock musician Adam (Tom Hiddleston, exuding fastidiously weary cool) and Eve (Tilda Swinton, pallid and otherworldly – I swear, you'd barely recognise her). Centuries old, the couple are married and still deeply in love though living apart: she in Tangier, he in a Detroit seemingly reverting to primeval jungle. The pair reunite, only to have their idyll crashed by Eve's wild-child sister (a louchely coquettish Mia Wasikowska). Not only that, but the top-quality ruby nectar is getting to be in short supply.
This is a film guaranteed to affect some viewers the way garlic affected Bela Lugosi. Some will find it unbearably arch and the lovers rebarbatively self-satisfied and above it all. And it might be objected that the vampire-junkie parallel has already been done to (un)death, notably in Abel Ferrara's The Addiction. But what makes Jarmusch's film so distinctive is that he pushes all the Anne Rice cliches to their limits, wryly acknowledging their creakiness, yet still finding humour and grace in them. And, despite the lofty exclusivity of Adam and Eve's bond, the pair also have a wit, warmth and raffish flamboyance that makes them oddly endearing.
The film is packed with Jarmusch's diverse preoccupations: Einsteinian physics, vintage guitars, the strangeness of fungi. A sumptuously narcotised atmosphere is conjured up, with many a rotating overhead shot, by cinematographer Yorick Le Saux. Jarmusch's band SQÜRL compose the score, together with experimental lute player Jozef van Wissem, and there's a show-stealing, intensely sexual live number by Lebanese singer Yasmine Hamdan.
Bound to appeal to the more discerning, literary-minded strain of young goth, Only Lovers is a droll, classy piece of cinematic dandyism that makes the Twilight cycle redundant in one exquisitely languid stroke.
