Only Lovers Left Alive Revisited or: A Mesmerizing Vampire Story Unlike Any Other (Film Analysis)

Being a vampire suCertainly isn't all fun and games.

Note: This is my second review of Only Lovers Left Alive.  Here's my original review from 2014, written back when the film first released.

You can't go out during the day for fear of being burned, meaning if you wish to travel cross country and/or overseas, you need to take a number of nighttime airplane trips.  You survive solely off of blood and are addicted to it—to the point where the mere sight is torturous to resist.  Yet you live in a modern age full of diseases, STDs, and contaminated blood where sucking the wrong person dry can end up poisoning and killing you.  Being immortal is pretty neat—you get to learn centuries of various skills and gain knowledge, become strapped for cash with all that experience, and see all the highs humanity has to offer.  With the highs, however, also come the lows of humanity—the worst and disgusting they have to offer.  Your lack of aging—in addition to a slip of the tongue where you nonchalantly mention knowing some century-old historical figure—can easily give away your true identity to those pesky, bothersome humans.  Any non-vampire friends or heroes will come and go in the blink of an eye.  It can be a lonely, depressing existence, and that’s exactly where the vampire Adam (Tom Hiddleston) currently finds himself.

Adam is depressed with the course modern humanity, or zombies as he refers to them, are taking—having become a recluse from society.  He’s seen his current homestead of Detroit go from being a once-great city to its current deteriorating condition.  Adam possesses immense musical talent and has gained many fans of his influential work, yet he can’t play live or even reveal himself since modern technology makes it near impossible to form a new identity once his lack of aging becomes apparent.  Adam's so depressed that he goes out of his way to have his grocery boy Ian (Anton Yelchin) buy him a wooden bullet as a means to possibly kill himself;

Adam: I need a bullet. A very special bullet.

Ian: Really? I got you that box of shells with the .38 last year.

Adam: I know, the .38. I need a .38-caliber bullet but made of wood.

Ian: A wooden bullet? Seriously, man?

Adam: And made from the hardest and most dense wood you can find. I'd suggest ironwood, lignum vitae. Maybe snakewood, piratinera guianensis. Or possibly African blackwood, dalbergia melanoxylon. Find someone who can make it for me?

Ian: Yeah, but could you just...? Could you repeat the last couple?

Fortunately, Adam does have a bright spot within his eternal, bleak lifestyle: his vampire wife Eve (Tilda Swinton) who he has passionately loved for at least the past couple centuries.  Eve is currently living in Tangier, Morocco, yet, after a webcam chat with her dejected hubby, books several flights through multiple countries to go be with and cheer him up.  Eve discusses her husband’s woe with the famous playwright Christopher Marlowe (John Hurt), who faked his death long ago and has been continuing on as a vampire.  Marlowe describes Adam as being a “suicidally romantic scoundrel”:

Christopher: Well, let's hope he's just romantic.

Eve: Even so, I mainly blame Shelley and Byron and some of those French assholes he used to hang around with.

Christopher: Oh, I wish that I had met him before I wrote Hamlet. He would have provided the most perfect role model imaginable.

Eve is far more optimistic and outgoing than Adam, providing a positive contrast to his somberness and melodrama.  According to Eve, this isn't the first time Adam has fallen into such a slum:

Eve: Can you tell your wife what your problem is?

Adam: It's these zombies and the way they treat the world. I just feel like all the sand’s at the bottom of the hourglass, or something.

Eve: Time to turn it over, then. Oh, my liege lord. We've been here before. Remember? You missed all the real fun, like the Middle Ages, the Tartars, the Inquisitions. The floods, the plagues.

She reassures him that when the South starts burning, people will start flocking back to the waters of Detroit and the city will thrive again and sets him straight regarding the wooden bullet; "How can you have lived for so long and still not get it? This self-obsession, it's a waste of living...that could be spent on surviving things, appreciating nature, nurturing kindness and friendship. And dancing. You've been pretty lucky in love, though, if I may say so."  The parallels between Adam and Eve are as blatant as their famously connected names.  Eve is the optimist, Adam the pessimist.  Eve has white hair and wears light clothing; Adam has black hair and wears dark clothing.  Together they make for a remarkably fascinating, adorable, and touching pair to observe—discussing all sorts of fact and philosophy across history alongside their moments of pure love and affection.

Director Jim Jarmusch has a definitive style of filming, with Only Lovers Left Alive being no exception to the rule.  The film's pacing is gradual, leisurely—lingering on shots and scenes, letting the audience soak in every detail.  And boy, is the film dripping with detail.  The design of Adam’s house is chockfull set pieces, as detailed by the pictures above.  It must have taken forever to get all these items and trinkets arranged, yet the end result gives the audience a vivid understanding of who Adam is.  Most of the film's humor stems from very cut-and-dry jokes involving the vampires’s ages and interactions with various long-deceased celebrities.  There’s a humorous moment where Adam mentions to Ian having seen Eddie Cochran—a famous rock and roll musician who died in 1960—play a specific version of guitar;

Ian: Wait. You actually saw Eddie Cochran play?

Adam: (Pauses)...Yeah, on YouTube.

The film's comedy revolves around making the couple’s vampirism seem casual and mundane—akin to an average married couple—such as when Eve tries buying the pair plane tickets and is briefly stumped when asked what their date of births are.  The film’s humor is strangely comparable to gimmicky sitcoms like The Munsters.  As someone who grew up watching, is a fan of, and owns the complete series—plus both movies—of The Munsters, the film’s cheesy comedy is nothing but pleasant and entertaining for me.  Similarly, the film's soundtrack sounds like something out of the 1960s, though certainly not from a sitcom.  The music is very psychedelic, beautifully complementing the vampires's detachment from society and feeding scenes where they drink blood from tiny glass cups—emulating the euphoric feeling of certain drugs as they both literally and figuratively fall into a blissful trace.

Only Lovers Left Alive is a slow yet mesmerizing film.  There’s one scene where Adam, later joined by Eve, watches real-life Lebanese singer Yasmine Hamdan perform.  It’s just three-minutes of him watching her sing, that’s it.  Yet everything about the scene is entrancing, and the song haunting.  The lyrics are symbolic towards Adam and Eve’s relationship, though one would only know if they spoke Arabic or (like me) looked it up after: 

"I adore you. And if a day passes by without seeing you. I forget you. How come this time I drew you. The longing moves the nostalgia in my heart. The night gets longer and the day passes backwards. Oh, my fragile heart. The separation is killing me...I have no solution. My heart doesn't love once. My heart doesn't long for you once either."

The talented singer brings a smile to Adam’s face—a glimmer of hope that not all of humanity's sand has hit the bottom yet.  Even better is the gift Eve gets for him: a beautiful oud instrument to play.  Being a vampire is certainly rough in the modern world, but with an eternal partner like Eve at his side, not all of it is gloom and doom for Adam. 

Whereas Jim Jarmusch’s masterpiece Paterson is a relatable film about mundane, everyday life, Only Lovers Left Alive takes one of fiction’s most fascinating creatures—with an array of bizarre attributes, unique abilities, and baffling weaknesses—and also places them in a relatable film leaning as close to mundane, everyday life as any vampire film has done before.  These ancient, supernatural beings are merely experiencing scaled-up versions of conversations, enjoyments, and problems we natural humans may face every day—such as an annoying relative that self-invites themselves over—only here the issue is augmented by them drinking up your limited life support and devouring one of your assistants.  It's also remarkably innocent in nature for a vampire story.  There may be blood and occasional death, but at its core is a story of straightforward love that has literally stood the test of time.  Only Lovers Left Alive is far different from any vampire story told before it and is, by far, the most innovative take towards the genre in the past several decades, if not more.