BYZANTIUM (2012)

Cast

Plot

Nearly two decades after the runaway success of Interview with the Vampire, director Neil Jordan returns to blood-sucking territory, here in the altogether more prosaic setting of the run-down English seaside town which 200-year-old mother and daughter duo Clara and Eleanor have made their latest temporary home. Sex is the means of survival for voluptuous Clara, who promptly befriends local sad sack Noel in order to set up a brothel, while the morose Eleanor finds a kindred spirit in local waiter Frank, who begins to coax her extraordinary life story out of her. A quasi-feminist spin on vampiric mythology, Byzantium sadly gets increasingly mired in moral and narrative muddlement, its mournful tone all-too-frequently punctured by wearyingly clunky passages of dialogue.