Forget Twilight, forget the oh-so-romantic Gary Oldman-Dracula, forget Interview with a Vampire. Who one bloody love story If you want something that can do more than just kitsch and bad sayings, it needs a film.
What would it really be like to be able to share eternity with the great love of your life? To watch the centuries go by with everything slipping through your fingers? Jim Jarmusch answers these and many other questions honestly in his romantic vampire manifesto Only Lovers Left Alive, which you can only stream for a short time in the ARD media library.
In Only Lovers Left Alive, two loving vampires try to survive against all odds
Adam (Loki star Tom Hiddleston) and Eve (Doctor Strange mentor Tilda Swinton) are old. Very old. As the world moves on, kingdoms rise and fall, technology evolves, and trends come and go, they always stay the same. Adam and Eve are Vampires.
Together they do their best to stay alive. To get blood without actually harming anyone. At least they have each other, supported by one another everlasting love. Together they watch the madness of humanity, all the wars, all the hatred.
At least that’s what Adam sees. He is an artist soul, musician, sensitive and now almost depressed. Eve, on the other hand, is cheerful, experimental and almost always hopeful. She loves his esthete, he loves her strength. But the unconditional love of the two will put to a tough testwhen Eve’s little sister suddenly stumbles into her life.
Thanks to Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton, Only Lovers Left Alive is perhaps the most touching vampire film ever
It would be a lie to claim that Only Lovers Left Alive avoids all vampire clichés or reinvents the love story. But Jarmusch still manages thanks to his tenderly playing main actors an epic that philosophizes about all the absurd topics in a refreshingly sober and humane way.
You have to have a little patience for this mediation everything that makes life wonderful and worth living whether you are human or vampire. But anyone who doesn’t get hold of Hiddleston’s deeply sad look and who can’t smile with Swinton must be very cold. The two of them bring so much joy and love for their roles, each other, the art – that it simply has to be infectious.
Only Lovers Left Alive is pure melancholy, bittersweet like dark chocolate on deep red strawberries. He’s almost frighteningly beautiful, tough and realistic when he needs to be and heartbreakingly romantic.
Currently Only Lovers Left Alive is still available for free ARD media library to stream. But on December 18th he disappears from there. So take your chance for a bit of melancholic vampire romance in the dark season.