The highly uncommon Only Lovers Left Alive oozes atmosphere and maintains a perfect tone–down-tempo, suave, irresistible. It’s formal rigor leaves not a hair out of place. It’s three primary actors don’t merely raise the bar for vampire movies, they shatter it. Tilda Swinton nearly singes a hole in the screen, Tom Hiddleston is scary with screen presence, and Mia Wasikowska almost steals the show. The film makes any Jim Jarmusch film since Dead Man seem inadequate by comparison.
Swinton plays Eve, an all-wise immortal who lives in Tangier and gets her blood supply from John Hurt, or if you will, Christopher Marlowe. She provides a stability for her transcontinental lover, Adam, a desperately troubled, reclusive musical genius. They first greet each other on a twisted Skype exchange before Swinton decides to embark to his habitat in Detroit (night flights only, of course). Adam is holed up in a dingy apartment full of musical equipment and an unplugged refrigerator. His area of Detroit couldn’t be more remote, but he is nonetheless stalked by rock ‘n roll zombies. Back In the day, Adam, who’s got quite a temper, hung out with the likes of Lord Byron but these days he limits excursions outside of the apartment to visits to a hospital where he picks up highly pure blood from a nervous employee (Jeffrey Wright). His long musician hair tucked into a pony tail, and decked out in a surgical mask and scrubs, Adam is reminded by Wright that the stethoscope he carries is “from the 1970s and practically an antique.” His camouflaged identity survives his anachronistic error but not before he gives pause when passing a blood-stained patient.
Eve does her best to take the edge off Adam’s depression, which was intense enough before her arrival that he commissioned an obsequious hanger-on to bring him a specially-made wooden bullet to end his centuries of misery. It menacingly sits in the chamber of a revolver that Eve stumbles upon. Eve tries to impart her acquired wisdom of the ages (projected note-perfectly by Swinton) to uplift Adam. She lets Adam take her on long narrated drives through abandoned streets of Detroit with sets so barren and hollow they could be on Mars. However, any leveling out of Adam’s not-so-human condition is drastically blunted with the arrival of Eve’s notorious sister, Ava (Wasikowska).
Ava likes to take chances and continually disrupts the couple’s equilibrium with doses of vanity and immaturity. Once she arrives the movie picks up a head of steam that builds to a crescendo before an unexpected tragedy befalls Adam and Eve. A scene where she finally gets the two fuddy duddies out to a nightclub provides a hilarious jolt when the extremely secretive Adam hears his own music played over the club’s sound system.
Jarmusch, a master of deadpan since his brilliant first film, Stranger Than Paradise (1984), has constructed a feverish provocation that ironically drives its power from its restraint. Some may say his insistence in creating a cinematic world unique to his every whim and quirk smacks of self-reverential navel gazing. Rubbish! This little seriocomic tale will send your heart aflutter.