The Daily Stream becomes the Daily Scream for spooky season!
When I say that I love this movie, that it’s one of my very favorite movies of the 21st century, I mean merely that I want to live inside it. I want to crawl into 2014’s Only Lovers Left Alive and curl up in its lap and stay there forever.
Writer-director Jim Jarmusch renders his film so languid and so uncoerced that his aristocratic vampires Adam and Eve (profoundly empathetic performances by Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton) feel utterly real. Their utter realness only underscores the notion that, in their minds, we mortal muggles are the monsters, the zombies. We’re the ones who mess up the world. They have to stay hidden because we will ruin them. We’d bore them to death, if nothing else.
I’m so in love with these vampires, with their lofty idealism, with their engagement with history and science and art and the future and what it all means. Maybe that’s scary? If so, I don’t care. (Read my 2014 review.)
US: stream on Hulu; rent/buy on Prime and Apple TV
UK: stream on Mubi (via Prime); rent on BFI Player and Curzon Home Cinema; rent/buy on Prime and Apple TV
See Only Lovers Left Alive at Letterboxd for more viewing options.
