Official trailer
The Hunger gets its 6.5 the way a fashion shoot gets a magazine cover.
It’s a ravishing vampire film and an empty one, a film so committed to its own surface that it forgets to put anything underneath. Tony Scott directed it as his feature debut, fresh from commercials, and it shows in every frame. The film looks extraordinary. It also feels like an extraordinary-looking thing happening at a distance, behind glass, to people you never quite reach.
What saves it from being a complete failure is that the surface is gorgeous and the premise underneath has real sorrow in it, if you dig. The problem is that Scott skips the digging for light through gauze curtains, Catherine Deneuve’s cheekbones, slow motion and billowing fabric. The film is a mood given two hours, and whether that’s enough depends entirely on what you came for.
I want to like this film more than I do. Whenever the camera drifts through those curtains I’m half seduced, and whenever a scene ends I notice that nothing has happened. Deneuve and Bowie are about as perfect a vampire couple as I can imagine, and I think Scott wasted them on a two-hour perfume ad.
Style as the Entire Project
Tony Scott came from advertising, and The Hunger is what happens when a commercial director gets a feature and a vampire script.
Every shot is composed like a perfume ad. Doves fly through apartments in slow motion. Sunlight filters through layers of fabric. The camera glides and lingers and caresses. The film is a sustained act of visual seduction, and on the pure level of images it succeeds completely.
The opening sequence is justly famous, intercutting a goth nightclub performance with the predatory hunt of the two vampire leads, all of it cut to the band Bauhaus performing on stage. It’s one of the great openings of eighties cinema, a perfect fusion of music, image, and menace. For five minutes the film promises something electric. That opening thrills me. The cutting between the stage and the hunt is so confident that I was ready to forgive the film anything, and that goodwill is exactly what the next ninety minutes burn through.
Then it spends the next ninety minutes failing to deliver on that promise, because gorgeous images can’t substitute for a story that moves. Scott mistook atmosphere for substance. The film keeps looking magnificent long after it’s stopped meaning anything, and the gap between how good it looks and how little it accomplishes is the central frustration.
Deneuve, Bowie, and Sarandon
The casting is inspired even when the script wastes it. Catherine Deneuve plays Miriam, an ancient Egyptian vampire who takes human lovers and grants them centuries of life, then watches them decay when the promise of eternal youth turns out to have an expiration date. Deneuve is perfectly cast as a creature of cold, timeless beauty, and she plays Miriam with an unbothered serenity that suits a being who has buried a hundred lovers.
David Bowie plays her current companion John, and his section is the best acting in the film. John discovers that Miriam’s gift of eternal life doesn’t include eternal youth, and he begins to age rapidly, decades in days. Bowie plays the horror of sudden decay with real anguish, and his scenes in a clinic waiting room, aging by the hour while a doctor refuses to believe him, carry the only real dread the film generates.
Bowie’s decay is the part of the film I’d keep if I could only keep one. He’s frightened, furious and helpless in that waiting room, and it’s the only stretch where I stopped admiring the lighting and started caring.
Susan Sarandon plays the doctor, Sarah, a researcher into aging who becomes Miriam’s next target. Her seduction by Miriam is the film’s most discussed sequence, and Sarandon commits fully.
But the script gives her a character who behaves according to plot need instead of human logic, and her arc never quite convinces. She’s a function in beautiful clothing.
The Premise Buried in the Beauty
There’s a good film hidden inside The Hunger, and it’s about the cruelty of Miriam’s gift.
She offers her lovers eternal life and they accept, not understanding that eternal doesn’t mean young. After a few centuries they begin to age, all at once, but they can’t die. Miriam keeps them, withered and conscious, in boxes in her attic, an entire collection of former lovers who trusted her and are now neither living nor dead.
That’s a horror premise with real philosophical weight, a meditation on the difference between living forever and staying young, on the cruelty of a promise honored to the letter and betrayed in spirit. The image of the attic full of conscious, decayed lovers is the film’s one moment of true terror and true sadness.
But the film barely engages with its own best idea. It mentions the horror, shows the attic briefly, and returns to its perfume-ad reveries.
A filmmaker more interested in meaning than mood would have built the whole film around that attic. Scott uses it as one more strong image among many, and the film’s richest vein goes mostly unmined.
This is what makes me angriest about The Hunger. A great horror idea is sitting right there in the attic, and Scott walks past it to film another dove. I’d have built the whole third act up there.
The Collapse of the Ending
The film’s final act falls apart. Without detailing the mechanics, the resolution abandons the careful logic of Miriam’s curse for a confused supernatural climax and a tacked-on coda that the studio reportedly forced and that makes little sense. After ninety minutes of glacial mood, the ending lurches into events that feel both rushed and unearned, as though the film suddenly remembered it needed to conclude and grabbed the nearest exit.
This is the cost of a film built on atmosphere instead of story. When you haven’t constructed a real narrative engine, the ending has nothing to resolve, so it manufactures chaos instead. The visually gorgeous film simply stops being coherent in its last twenty minutes, and the incoherence is the bill coming due for two hours of style without structure.
Is The Hunger worth watching?
The Hunger gets its 6.5 as a gorgeous, hollow film that’s worth seeing for its surfaces and its cast and frustrating for everything it refuses to do with them.
Tony Scott’s images are flawless, the Bauhaus opening is iconic, Bowie’s aging sequence is moving, and the premise about eternal life without eternal youth is haunting. But the film mistakes atmosphere for story, wastes its best idea, squanders Sarandon, and collapses into incoherence at the end. A beautiful object with too little inside it.
Watch it for the look and the legend, and go in expecting to admire it more than you enjoy it. The 6.5 is my split verdict: high marks for every frame, for Bowie and for that opening, and a real penalty for a film that had a haunting idea and couldn’t be bothered to use it.
