Adam (snake-hipped Tom Hiddleston) and Eve (beige diamante Tilda Swinton) are sultry, super-cool, extremely ancient vampires in Jim Jarmusch’s slow, stylish, Only Lovers Left Alive. Adam is in Detroit, eery in its failed-state-ness, plonking out great music and generally being melancholy. Eve is in Tangiers, itself an otherworldly and exotically sexy backdrop. They communicate by iPhone (Adam and Eve and the apple….) and make convoluted plans to source unpolluted blood from suppliers with strange names and stranger histories. Finally Eve comes to visit, but the lovers’ joyful reunion (blood popsicles!) begins to unravel when Eve’s sister turns up unexpectedly and kills his human servant (“You drank Ian!” – no one said it’s not a witty film) forcing Adam and Eve to flee back to Tangiers.
So Only Lovers is literally a masterpiece. Maybe not quite, but really, too close to call. It is utterly ravishing to look at, and Swinton and Hiddleston are unmissable, you simply cannot take your eyes off them in any scene they’re in. The script is very clever, the mythology it creates is rounded and fulfilling and the locations, Detroit and Tangiers, contribute to the eery mesmer of the tale. Adam’s house, incidentally, is at 82 Alfred Street in Detroit. Street View it here.