Vampires are one of the most flexible monsters in the Western canon. If you want hedonistic monsters, watch Interview With a Vampire. If you want just plain monsters, there’s the Blade trilogy, From Dusk Till Dawn (but not its sequels, never its sequels), 2024’s Abigail, or you could go older-school with Kathryn Bigelow’s underappreciated Near Dark. If you’re in the mood for unaccountably sexy vampires, there’s Interview again, or 1995’s Embrace of the Vampire. If you just want a really good vampire movie, watch Sinners.
Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive, now available for free on Tubi, is from the harder-to-navigate vampire subgenre of, well, ennui. If you lived forever, then no matter what sort of zest for life you’ve got, you’d eventually get bored. Maybe you’d even get a little scared. Only Lovers Left Alive is about that peculiar tension, when there’s nothing left to do in your life but run out the clock.
More importantly, it’s about Adam (Tom Hiddleston) and Eve (Tilda Swinton), a married vampire couple who’re hiding from each other and the world.
Adam is a vampire and a celebrated musician who’s quietly influenced world culture since the Elizabethan era. Now he’s hiding in a mansion in Detroit, unable to feed directly on humans for fear that 21st-Century living has contaminated their blood.
Eve is on the other side of the world, in Tangier, loving Adam from a safe distance. She isn’t there to watch as Adam sinks deeper into a sort of nostalgic depression, but soon gets the idea that they might be better off together. Their reunion is spoiled by the appearance of Ava (Mia Wasikowska), Eve’s kid sister, who enters Adam and Eve’s situation like a hand grenade thrown into a quiet foyer. Soon, what little peace they’ve won is at risk, along with their carefully guarded unlives.
Like Adam and Eve themselves, Only Lovers Left Alive feels like a dispatch from a forgotten era. It’s luxuriously paced with an arthouse feel, happy to linger on particularly careful shots. This isn’t a story by itself as much as it’s a chapter, a look inside a long moment of these ancient monsters’ lives.
Both Hiddleston and Swinton were born to play this kind of role. It’s a wonder Swinton in particular hasn’t played a hundred vampires in her career, as she’s incredible at this sort of unearthly, distanced characterization. Her Eve doesn’t feel like she’s inhabiting the same plane as anyone else, always abstracted from every situation by years and experience.
Hiddleston, who spends the whole movie like it’s his audition piece to play Jim Morrison in a future Doors biopic, is another example of incredible casting. Every frame of Adam is a portrait of depression fatigue. Hiddleston somehow manages to play Adam as barely here without himself being barely here, which is a tricky needle to thread.
It’s worth noting that Only Lovers Left Alive is in no hurry to get where it’s going. It’s a movie that’s largely about music, but which is often defined by its low tones and evocative stillness. You need to be in the mood to meet it where it lives.
Further, while many platforms will call Only Lovers Left Alive a dramatic picture, it’s got more than its share of horror in store. It’s a more subtle kind of scare than the buckets of blood and sudden screams of another vampire film, but it’s no less creepy for it. Maybe that’s the secret of Only Lovers Left Alive: it’s a vampire film, but its protagonists are actually ghosts, left to haunt what’s left of their lives.
Only Lovers Left Alive is now available to stream on Tubi.
💸 Earn Instantly With This Task
No fees, no waiting — your earnings could be 1 click away.
Start Earning
