Byzantium (2012)

Official trailer

Byzantium deserves 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.

Jordan’s return to vampires affects me in a way most vampire films don’t. It cares more about two tired women trying to stay alive than about bloodletting for its own sake, and I found that far more haunting than any amount of spectacle. It also tests my patience in its back half, and that’s the gap between this and a higher score.

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 sustain it, and its vision of vampirism as a 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 complicated 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. I think Ronan is the reason this works as well as it does, playing Eleanor like an old woman stuck in a girl’s body, and Arterton matches her with a fierceness that keeps Clara from turning into a cartoon.

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 political point of view.

This is what I admire most about the film. Plenty of vampire movies flirt with an idea, and this one commits to its argument from start to finish without ever turning into a lecture.

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 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 waterfall of blood is the image I keep coming back to. It’s gorgeous and grotesque at once, and I think it’s the best single piece of vampire imagery the genre has produced in years.

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 romance is where the film loses me. I never cared about Eleanor’s sickly young man, and I’d have cut him entirely and handed those scenes back to Arterton and Ronan.

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 deserves 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 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 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.

I’m giving it a 7.5 because the ideas, the imagery and the two lead performances are strong enough that I forgive a lot, and because the drag in the back half keeps me from loving it outright. If you want a vampire film with something on its mind, I’d point you here before most of what the genre has turned out since.

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