Byzantium earns its 7.5 as the work of a director returning to territory he helped define and finding something new in it. Neil Jordan made Interview with the Vampire back in 1994, and nearly twenty years later he came back to vampires with a smaller, stranger, more feminist film. Byzantium is about two women, a mother and daughter, who have survived two centuries as vampires by hiding, lying, and preying at the margins of society.
It’s a film about female survival across time, about the stories women are allowed to tell about themselves, and it’s far more interested in those themes than in vampire spectacle.
The film is gorgeous, melancholy, and a little overstuffed, juggling two timelines and a dense mythology. It doesn’t always balance its ambitions, but Jordan’s craft and two strong central performances carry it, and its vision of vampirism as a specifically female burden gives it a perspective the genre rarely offers.
Two Women Across Two Centuries
The film follows Clara and Eleanor, vampires who appear to be a young woman and a teenage girl but who have been alive for two hundred years. Gemma Arterton plays Clara, the mother, who survives by any means available, working as a sex worker and a killer, fierce and pragmatic and protective. Saoirse Ronan plays Eleanor, the daughter, melancholy and bookish, exhausted by a long life of secrecy and longing to tell someone the truth of what she is.
Their relationship is the film’s center, and it’s a complex one, love bound up with resentment and dependence. Clara has kept them both alive through two centuries of brutality, making impossible choices to protect a daughter who doesn’t always understand the cost. Eleanor chafes against the lies and the constant flight, wanting a normal life her nature forbids. The two actresses play the long, strained intimacy of mother and daughter convincingly, and the film is strongest when it simply watches them navigate each other.
The Feminist Reframing
Byzantium’s most distinctive quality is its feminist perspective on the vampire myth. The film’s mythology is explicitly gendered. The brotherhood of vampires that created this world is an all-male order that forbids women from joining, and Clara became a vampire by breaking into that order, a transgression the brotherhood has never forgiven. The women survive as outlaws for two reasons. They’re vampires, and they’re women who seized a power reserved for men.
This reframing runs through everything. Clara survives through sex work because it’s the means available to a woman with no other power, and her vampirism is bound up with that economy of female survival. Eleanor’s longing to tell her story is the longing of a woman whose truth no one will permit her to speak. The film is about women taking and keeping power that the world insists isn’t theirs, and the vampire myth becomes a vehicle for that argument. It’s the rare vampire film with a genuine political point of view.
Jordan’s Craft
Neil Jordan remains a gifted visual stylist, and Byzantium is beautiful, moving between a present-day English seaside town in melancholy decline and lush period flashbacks of the women’s eighteenth and nineteenth-century origins. The imagery is rich, including a strong waterfall of blood that marks the vampire transformation, an original piece of mythology-as-image. Jordan shoots the seaside town’s faded grandeur and the period sequences with equal care.
The film’s mythology is one of its pleasures and one of its problems. Jordan and writer Moira Buffini build an original vampire lore, no fangs but a sharpened thumbnail to open veins, the secret order, the blood waterfall, that feels freshly imagined instead of borrowed. But the film spends a lot of energy explaining this lore through flashback, and the dual timeline sometimes slows the present-day story to a crawl. The mythology is interesting enough to justify itself but heavy enough to weigh the film down.
The Overstuffed Structure
Byzantium’s main weakness is that it tries to hold too much. The two timelines, the dense original mythology, the mother-daughter drama, the present-day romance between Eleanor and a sickly young man, the pursuing brotherhood, all compete for space, and the film can’t quite service all of them. The present-day plot in particular feels underpowered, and the romance between Eleanor and the young man never develops the weight the film wants it to carry.
The result is a film richer in theme and atmosphere than in momentum. It’s always interesting to look at and think about, but it doesn’t always move, and the back half struggles to bring its many threads to a satisfying convergence. A more disciplined film might have cut a subplot and deepened the mother-daughter core that’s clearly its strongest material. Jordan reaches for an epic and delivers a beautiful, somewhat unwieldy chamber piece.
Is Byzantium worth watching?
Byzantium earns its 7.5 as a thoughtful, beautiful, distinctly feminist vampire film from a director revisiting territory he helped define. Neil Jordan’s vision of vampirism as a specifically female burden, carried by strong performances from Gemma Arterton and Saoirse Ronan as a mother and daughter bound across two centuries, gives the film a genuine point of view the genre rarely offers. It loses points for an overstuffed dual-timeline structure, a heavy load of mythology, and an underpowered present-day plot.
A rich, ambitious, slightly unwieldy film whose ideas and atmosphere outrun its momentum, and a rewarding watch for anyone wanting vampire cinema with something on its mind.
Frequently Asked Questions
Writing in This Genre
This film appears on 2 of my film lists
