Only Lovers Left Alive is a 2013 British-German romantic drama vampire film written and directed
by Jim Jarmusch, starring Tom Hiddleston, Tilda Swinton, Mia Wasikowska, John Hurt,
and Jeffrey Wright.
It was nominated for the Palme d'Or at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival.
Plot After living for centuries and influencing
the careers of countless famous musicians and scientists, vampire Adam has become a
reclusive musician.
He spends his days recording albums on outdated studio equipment and lamenting the state of
the modern world while he sulks in a dilapidated house in a deserted Detroit neighborhood.
He has become convinced that humanity is doomed and continually refers to humans as "zombies".
Adam survives on blood-bank donations regularly supplied by Dr. Watson, who is happy to take
Adam's money and not ask any questions.
Having acquired substantial amounts of scientific knowledge over the years, the vampire has
managed to build contraptions to power both his home and vintage sports car with technology
originally pioneered by Nikola Tesla.
Despite his reclusive nature, he is immensely wealthy and remains a popular musician.
His many fans endlessly speculate about his whereabouts and real identity.
Adam is horrified when a few of them turn up on his doorstep one night having figured
out his address.
He ignores them and they go away.
The vampire also pays Ian, a naive human "rock and roll kid", to bring him various vintage
guitars and recording equipment.
One night, Adam asks him to track down a wooden bullet for, as he puts it, "a project".
Ian fulfills this request and Adam loads it into a small pistol.
He contemplates suicide but a video phone call from his wife, Eve, convinces him not
to go through with his plans.
Eve has spent the past several years living in Tangier where she purchases her blood supply
from another vampire, Christopher Marlowe.
Fearing for Adam's life, she flies to Detroit.
The lovers unite and are content enjoying each other's company, eating blood popsicles,
playing chess, dancing to music at home, and driving around the city at night.
Then, a short time later, Eve's younger sister, Ava, arrives from Los Angeles and shatters
the couple's idyllic seclusion.
After a night out at a local club, Ava kills Ian by drinking all of his blood, and she
is kicked out of the house by Adam.
Adam and Eve dispose of Ian's corpse in an abandoned factory.
Ian's murder, in addition to a growing number of Adam's fans continually trekking out to
the house, forces the couple to hastily return to Tangier.
Experiencing blood-withdrawal, they discover that their long-time friend and mentor Marlowe
has fallen ill due to a bad batch of blood.
After revealing that he secretly penned most of Shakespeare's plays, he dies.
Running low on finances and with no blood supply to curb their cravings, the couple
spot a pair of young lovers kissing.
"What choice do we have?"
Adam remarks before the two of them approach the couple with their fangs out.
Cast Tom Hiddleston as Adam
Tilda Swinton as Eve Mia Wasikowska as Ava
John Hurt as Marlowe Jeffrey Wright as Dr. Watson
Anton Yelchin as Ian Slimane Dazi as Bilal
Yasmine Hamdan as Yasmine White Hills as themselves
Production In August 2010, Jarmusch said that Swinton,
Michael Fassbender, Mia Wasikowska, and John Hurt had agreed to join the film, described
by Jarmusch in May 2011 as a "crypto-vampire love story," but he did not have financing
yet.
Financing the film was a difficult process for the director, and he explained at the
film's world premiere at the Cannes International Film Festival in May 2013 that, "it's getting
more and more difficult for films that are a little unusual, or not predictable, or don't
satisfy people's expectations of something."
Jarmusch revealed in 2014 that, after seven years of frustration, Swinton said to him:
"That's good news, it means that now is not the time.
It will happen when it needs to happen."
The film was eventually financed by producer Jeremy Thomas's international sales entity
HanWay Films.
It also received contributions towards its US$7-million budget from Greek financier Christos
V. Konstantakopoulos, the German "NRW Filmstiftung" regional fund, and the Michigan, U.S. film
incentive.
Thomas later said that Jarmusch is "one of the great American independent film-makers
– he's the last of the line.
People are not coming through like that any more".
In January 2012, Tom Hiddleston replaced Fassbender prior to the beginning of filming.
The film began shooting in June 2012 in numerous locations: in the Brush Park district of Detroit,
Michigan, U.S.; Tangier, Morocco; and Hamburg and Cologne, Germany.
The total duration of filming was seven weeks.
The film is one of several Jarmusch productions, alongside films such as Night on Earth, in
which the action mainly occurs at night-time.
Swinton stated after the film's release: "Jim is pretty much nocturnal, so the nightscape
is pretty much his palette.
There's something about things glowing in the darkness that feels to me really Jim Jarmusch.
He's a rock star."
Soundtrack Jarmusch's band SQÜRL, primarily responsible
for the film's score, opens the film with a version of Wanda Jackson’s 1961 song “Funnel
of Love.”
Other contributors to the soundtrack are Zola Jesus and Lebanese vocalist Yasmine Hamdan,
while Dutch lute player Jozef van Wissem's compositions formed a core element of the
film's overall aural aesthetic.
During the week of the soundtrack album's release, in April 2014, Van Wissem explained:
I know the way [Jarmusch] makes his films is kind of like a musician.
He has music in his head when he’s writing a script so it’s more informed by a tonal
thing than it is by anything else ... I feel that I’m sort of political.
Jim’s film is anti-contemporary-society.
And the lute goes against all technology and against all computers and against all the
shit you don’t need.
Van Wissem also described the film as "a very personal film, maybe even autobiographical,"
further explaining that "Jim is a cultural sponge, he absorbs everything."
A concert was held at the Santos Party House venue in New York City, U.S. in April 2014
to celebrate the release of Jarmusch's eleventh feature film.
During the Santos event, Jesus performed with van Wissem on both a “pseudo-Gregorian”
piece from the film's soundtrack and an unrecorded collaboration.
Release
In April 2013, the film was added to the 2013 Cannes Film Festival in the competition section.
It was shown at several film festivals, such as the September 2013 Toronto International
Film Festival, four screenings at the September/October 2013 Reykjavík International Film Festival,
and as an opening film for the 4th American Film Festival held in Wrocław, Poland.
The film was officially released in the United Kingdom on February 21, 2014, and opened in
the United States on April 11, 2014.
Reception Critical response
Only Lovers Left Alive received positive reviews from critics.
Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a score of 87% based on 104 reviews.
The critical consensus states that "Worth watching for Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton's
performances alone, Only Lovers Left Alive finds writer-director Jim Jarmusch adding
a typically offbeat entry to the vampire genre."
Metacritic gave the film a rating of 75/100, based on 31 reviews.
Scott A. Gray of Exclaim!
gave the film 8 out of 10, calling it "a visually poetic love story with a wry, jaded sense
of humour about finding reasons to wake up every night."
Calum Marsh of Slant Magazine gave it 3 out of 4 stars.
Jonathan Romney of Screen International commented that it is Jarmusch's most poetic film since
Dead Man.
Todd McCarthy of The Hollywood Reporter described the film as "the perennial downtown filmmaker's
best work in many years, probably since 1995's Dead Man, with which it shares a sense of
quiet, heady, perilous passage."
Jonathan Hatfull of SciFiNow wrote that it is Jarmusch's best film since Ghost Dog.
Robbie Collin from The Daily Telegraph awarded the film 4 out of 5 stars and praised the
performances of Swinton and Hiddleston: "In the time-honoured Jarmuschian fashion, the
few things that happen in Only Lovers Left Alive happen very slowly, but the dialogue
is always gloomily amusing, and Swinton and Hiddleston's delivery of the gags is as cold
and crisp as footsteps in fresh snow."
Jessica Kiang of IndieWire gave the film a B+ grade, saying, "the real pleasure of the
film is in its languid droll cool and its romantic portrayal of the central couple,
who are now our number one role models in the inevitable event of us turning vampiric."
Tim Grierson of Paste noted that "Hiddleston and Swinton play their characters not as blasé
hipsters but, rather, deeply reflective, almost regretful old souls who seem to have decided
that love is about the only thing you can count on."
Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian gave the film 3 out of 5 stars, pointing that Adam and Eve
look more like "well-born incestuous siblings" in spite of being lovers, while the Observer's
Jonathan Romney concluded that the film is "a droll, classy piece of cinematic dandyism
that makes the Twilight cycle redundant in one exquisitely languid stroke."
Kurt Halfyard of Twitch Film commented: "Retro recording equipment hasn't looked this claustrophobically
sexy since Berberian Sound Studio."
Alfred Joyner of International Business Times felt that "the melancholy that permeates Motown
in the film could be seen as Jarmusch's take on the loss of America's greatness in the
21st century."
Accolades
References
External links Official website
Only Lovers Left Alive at the Internet Movie Database
Only Lovers Left Alive at Box Office Mojo Only Lovers Left Alive at Rotten Tomatoes
Only Lovers Left Alive at Metacritic