Review: Byzantium (15)

Clara and Eleanor (Gemma Arterton and Saoirse Ronan) are the bloodsuckers who have been around for centuries and who fetch up in a seaside town where they move into a run-down hotel and casually take over.
Soon they are preying on the town’s population. In Eleanor’s case it means targeting the elderly: old folk on the verge of death who long for release. With compassion she provides it. But humanity collides with death on a daily/nightly basis. Clara has none of her partner’s emotions. Hers is a path borne of past experiences at the hands of soldiers and others who used and abused her. And who are the nocturnal men in suits who stalk her…?
Directed by Neil Jordan from a script by Moira (Jane Eyre) Buffini based on her own play, Byzantium is better suited to the TV mini series than a two-hour movie, such is the depth and complexity of the story.

Thus Jane Austen meets Twilight. Yet this bitty hybrid will appeal to neither group of conditioned fans. Too 
sexy, too bloody for Austen purists, not romantic enough for lovers of Stephenie 
Meyer. 
Yet whilst Jordan never quite manages to pull off the wider ensemble, he does coax terrific performances from his two heroines. Byzantium stands as the best thing Arterton has yet done and she is wholly believable as the sultry killer. 
Ronan plays another of her ethereal femmes and is perfectly partnered by Arterton. 
As links between past and present Sam Riley and Jonny Lee Miller crop up as soldiers offering clues to Clara’s vampiric state.