Byzantium (2013)

Neil Jordan returns to the vampire picture two decades after Interview with the Vampire, and he returns with better manners. Byzantium is a coastal-gothic two-hander about Clara and Eleanor, mother and daughter, undead and eternally irritated with each other. The film is handsome, damp, and unhurried, and its flashback structure braids Napoleonic-era misery into a present-day English seaside town that has clearly seen better decades. The mood is impeccable. The pacing is another matter entirely.

Where the film earns its cultural credit is in the mythology itself. The Brethren, a secret society of vampire gentlemen, admit Clara to their ranks grudgingly, then inform her that a low-born prostitute may hold no office among them. Her crime is not vampirism. It is ambition. Moira Buffini's screenplay treats this exclusion as an injustice worth correcting, and critics at the time reached for the phrase feminist spirit. That reading holds up. Clara seizes immortality through theft and violence, raises a daughter alone, and ignores every instruction handed down by men in ceremonial robes. The film never stops to explain any of it. It arranges the pieces and lets the audience do the arithmetic.

Which is why the sermonizing never arrives. Byzantium prefers atmosphere to argument, and its politics stay buried in the architecture. There is a whisper of class resentment in the Brethren's contempt for Clara's origins, though the decaying hotel and the inherited fortune function as gothic furniture, not economic thesis. The film shows no interest in race, climate, body image, or the varieties of neurodivergence. Its cast is white and European, and its concerns are inheritance, hunger, and the difficulty of keeping a teenage daughter off the streets. The result is a vampire film with a genuine idea in its head and no wish to lecture anyone about it. A rare vintage.