Byzantium

Byzantium (2013) is set in an English seaside town. A mother and daughter have been alive for two hundred years and keep moving on. Clara works for money and protects her daughter; Eleanor, frozen at sixteen, wants to write her own story and releases the pages into the wind. There is an order governing their existence and it does not admit women. Neil Jordan directed. He had made Interview with the Vampire in 1994, and this is a return to the same genre twenty years later from an entirely different position. Its rules depart from the usual vampire fiction. There are no fangs; the transformation happens by travelling to an island and crossing a threshold there. Drinking blood is shown not as an attack but usually as something done with consent. The source is Moira Buffini's own play A Vampire Story, and she wrote the screenplay. Gemma Arterton plays the mother and Saoirse Ronan the daughter. It was shot in Hastings, and the title comes from the name of an old hotel there. It runs 118 minutes. Good for: the female side of vampire cinema, gothic atmosphere, and Saoirse Ronan. Less good for: the movement between two timelines is tiring and the nineteenth century sections run long. There is violence and prostitution in it. The film's own mythology is explained late, and until then the rules stay unclear.