Only Lovers Left Alive | Film review – Tom & Tilda’s undead lovers ooze hipster cool in seductive vampire movie

Forget Edward Cullen and Bella Swan. The long-lived undead lovers played by Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton in cult director Jim Jarmusch’s highly unconventional vampire movie Only Lovers Left Alive ooze so much hipster cool they make the Twilight pair look positively anaemic.

And forget garlic, crucifixes and wooden stakes. Jarmusch dispenses with the usual vampire paraphernalia to deliver a beguiling meditation on love and immortality. Prepare, though, for a slow moving tale (what’s the hurry when you live for centuries?), with the lovers spending most of the film’s first half apart, living on separate continents – Hiddleston’s reclusive musician Adam holed up in a crumbling mansion in post-industrial Detroit, while Swinton’s avidly curious bohemian Eve hangs out with John Hurt’s undead Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe in exotic Tangiers.

There is a brief flurry of action when Eve’s wayward, trouble-making sister Ava (Mia Wasikowska) turns up and causes panic in Detroit, but for the most part the story moves at a decidedly languid pace. Yet give the film time and you will surely succumb to its intensely romantic, deeply sensuous mood.

Certificate 15. Runtime 118 mins. Director Jim Jarmusch.

Released on DVD, Blu-ray, and Steelbook exclusive to Zavvi by Soda Pictures. 

To activate the sound in the trailer: hold your cursor over the screen to reveal the control panel and click on the volume control in the bottom right-hand corner.