Correct love story between two centennial vampires in current times suffering from a lack of focus for what concerns the tone of the film, jumping all over the place between existentialist drama, to romance, to comedy, etc. This ambiguity in genre and overall message from the film refrains it from being better than just ok.

Eve and Adam (Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston respectively) are two vampires that although living far from each other (Eve in Tangier and Adam in Detroit) are deeply tied with each other by their love that has spread through the ages. This distance will be erased when Eve will go to find Adam who is depressed by the path that humans (or zombies, as they call them) are taking as a species, disregarding their true capabilities, their health and their planet as a whole. All this will be shaken up by the arrival of Eve’s sister Ava (Mia Wasikowska).

As in basically all vampire stories, the atmosphere of the film and visual output is of the outmost importance. This is shown by a great work on sets and locations, either being the exteriors of Tangiers or the suburbs of Detroit as well as the indoor spaces represented mainly by the apartments of the two lovers (which carefully also show the interest of the two, literature for Eve and music for Adam). That aspect is coupled by also great costume design and make-up through which each vampire shows a distinct taste, the emo from Hiddleston, Arabic from Tilda Swinton and hip from Wasikowska. The last atmospherically element will be the use of music which either if it is through embedded into the happenings of the film (through discs or live music) or through the score really puts you into the mostly melancholic mood of the movie.

Unfortunately, we can’t say that this is coupled by equally splendid performances as, even if it is not that they are bad because they are obviously not, the fact that is a story more reliant on aesthetics makes them rather irrelevant. We could say that all the cast fulfils its minimal purposes, but we do not gather any extra emotion from them.

But, as it has already referred to, what it really is a pity is the uncertainty in narrative development that it is perceived by the writing and story in itself. Its initial purely existential drama, which is the most interesting approach of the entire picture, gets suddenly and completely twisted by the arrival of Ava turning the movie into a sort of dark comedy which does not really manages to achieve the same punch that the first approach was maybe not getting straight away but was managing to calmly build up. That is why, this sudden change in tonality so much out of the blue does not only not succeed but even diminishes any sort of purpose of message previously set. The sudden complete disregard of a seemingly relevant MacGuffin such as the bullet that Adam might use to end his life, which could have been more adequately exploited, is a clear example of it.

So what do we get, Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive is a movie that although displaying some of the essence of the filmmaker’s approach such as the quietness and great use of music, accompanied by a great visual presentation, after all it is its flawed storytelling which hurts an otherwise solid movie that had a lot of potential, as it can be sensed by some of the humanist messages put forward at different points of the film, but ends up falling slightly flat.