Byzantium Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		3.0
Audio		4.5
Extras		3.0
Overall		3.5

Byzantium Blu-ray Movie Review

Do you really wanna live forever?

Reviewed by Casey Broadwater November 1, 2013

Between Jim Jarmusch's promising Only Lovers Left Alive—set to be released in December—and Alexandra Cassavetes' so-so Kiss of the Damned, 2013 needs another "serious" vampire movie like Dracula needs another stake through the heart. Still, there's something seductive about Byzantium, director Neil Jordan's return to the genre after his decadent 1994 adaptation of Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire. Jordan is working with a much smaller budget and less star-studded cast this time around—he no longer has the likes of Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Antonio Banderes, and Kirstin Dunst at his disposal—but he has brought all his usual kink and visual élan to this new tale of bloodsucking immortals, written by Moira Buffini, based on her stage play.

In a time when Twilight has neutered vampires and True Blood has relegated them to camp melodrama, Byzantium restores some of the sadness and psychological depth inherent in the vamp mythos. It's also unusual in that it mostly ditches the hypnotically elegant men that typically figure in these kinds of films to instead follow a pair of on-the-run female "soucriants" who have spent the past 200 years avoiding the judgement of the boys-only vampire brotherhood. This feminist undercurrent—of women breaking through the vampiric glass ceiling—surges just as powerfully as the film's inevitable sprays of arterial blood.

This is a story about the need to tell one's own story. Eleanor Webb (Saoirse Ronan), who, by all appearances, is a shy, mousey teenaged girl, is burdened by a tale that she can tell no one: that she is, in fact, over two hundred years old and subsides on human blood. Her moral bearing leads her to only feed on those at death's door—the elderly—but she still considers herself a monster. Drifting from town to town, she lives in hiding with her "sister," Clara (Gemma Arterton), who is actually Eleanor's mother, frozen perpetually in a twenty-three-year-old body. A lean, striking, curvaceous body that she uses to pay the bills, stripping and prostituting herself. Sold into sex slavery during the Napoleonic wars, before she was "turned," this is the only profession Clara's ever known. Sadly to say, it's also gainful employment—she can find work wherever she and Eleanor go.

And they're frequently going. When the film opens, Clara manages to garotte and decapitate an agent of the vampire brotherhood that's been tracking them, but this also forces them to torch their apartment—to burn the evidence—and flee to a sleepy holiday village on the English seaside, the sort of place with a dismal-looking pier and a run-down amusement park. Clara gets up to her old tricks, but when she finds a hapless and easily manipulated mamma's boy (Daniel Mays) who's recently inherited a guest house, she moves in, hires some Eastern European junkies off the street, and starts her own brothel. Meanwhile, Eleanor casts a spell over Frank (Caleb Landry Jones), a socially awkward early twentysomething dying of leukemia. The two take a writing class together at the local college, and after they get to know one another somewhat, Eleanor gives Frank a manuscript that details her entire life (and undead) history. Byzantium flashes back and forth between the present and the past, then, slowly—and satisfyingly —unlocking the mystery of how Eleanor and Clara came to be vampires on the lam. Without giving anything away, it involves a pair of noble-born soldiers (Sam Riley and Johnny Lee Miller), consumption, and a map to a desolate island off the Irish coast where immortal life can be had for a price.

Jordan and Buffini stray adamantly from the usual Bram Stoker-ish vampire conventions, giving their legend a whiff of ancient celtic paganism, invoking cursed burial mounds, waterfalls of blood, and swarming bats. Their vamps have no fangs (they use a sharp thumb talon), are not averse to daylight, and possess no real supernatural attributes other than immortality. And yet, the writer and director do embrace the emotional core of vampirism—the unbearable loneliness of living forever. Byzantium's illuminati underworld does not admit women, and so Clara and Eleanor—who stole their way into life everlasting—are outcasts, hunted through the ages. They have only one another, but even this bond is weakening due to their differing opinions on how to best survive. And as much as Eleanor enjoys Frank's company, she believes romantic love would be fatal to one of them, if not both.

Aside from the last act, where the action speeds up considerably, Byzantium moves at a measured pace, more keen on developing the characters than delivering horror movie shocks. Not that there aren't any thrills here—there are, including several scenes of gruesome, over-the-top bloodletting—but the film is more of a mood piece on the themes of motherhood, betrayal, and forlorn love. Like Jean Rollin, the low-budget French filmmaker of the 1970s who spent his career making female vampire movies, Neil Jordan understands the poetry of the undead. The longing. The bloodlust. The dreamy passage of time. The violence in the film sometimes feels counteractive to this sense of tonal sophistication; Byzantium would've worked just fine as a pure drama, carried by the charged relationships between the characters, the strong performances—Ronan and Arterton are perfect for their roles—and the stark atmosphere that Jordan and cinematographer Sean Bobbitt establish. Having shot Hunger, Shame, and 12 Years A Slave for Steve McQueen, Bobbitt is one of the most talented DPs working today, and the look he achieves here on a limited budget is fantastic. We could probably do without the CGI waterfalls of blood however, which are a bit much even for a film so otherwise grounded and—for a vampire movie—realistic.

Byzantium Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Byzantium can be visited on Blu-ray with a 1080p/AVC-encoded presentation that looks fine from a normal viewing distance but doesn't always satisfy upon close inspection. There are a few things going on here. The film was shot digitally with the venerable Arri Alexa camera, but since so much of the movie takes place in low-light situations, there's considerable source noise in the picture during dark scenes where you might expect it. Oddly, though, many of the brighter scenes also seem very noisy, giving the impression that there's been a decent amount of compression applied to this encode. It also appears in some scenes that DP Sean Bobbitt was trying to test the limits of the camera. The final sequence, outdoors at night in the deserted carnival, seems to have been shot only with existing light, leaving shadow detail harshly crushed and colors banded. (See the screenshot above, but note that it's an anomaly. Not all the shots look that rough.) With all the noise in the image, clarity definitely takes a hit at times, but elsewhere, the picture is sharp and detailed. Just keep in the mind that the overall variability won't really be noticeable unless you have an exceptionally large screen. Could the film have been treated better on Blu-ray? Possibly, but there are at least no overt distractions here.

Byzantium Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The picture quality may leave something to be desired, but Byzantium's lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 sound track is much more impressive, hosting a mix that's lush and involving, with excellent sound design. Lapping waves and tweeting birds. Carnival noise and street sounds. The explosion of bats out of the accursed cave, screeching and flapping in 360 degrees around you. Subwoofer action complements the tensest scenes, while the high-end remains clear and sharp throughout. The music, in particular, has a strong sense of clarity and richness, whether it's the haunting score from Javier Navarrete (Pan's Labyrinth) or the incidental music wafting through the arcade and fairgrounds. Dialogue is always clear and easy to understand, and the balance is consistent, requiring no changes in volume. The disc also includes an uncompressed Linear PCM 2.0 stereo mixdown, along with English SDH and Spanish subtitles.

Byzantium Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Interviews (SD, 1:16:34): The disc includes an extensive series of cast and crew interviews, including director Neil Jordan, stars Gemma Arterton, Saoirse Ronan, Sam Riley, and Calab Landry Jones, writer Moira Buffini, producers Stephen Woolly and Alan Moloney, cinematographer Sean Bobbitt, stunt coordinator Donal O'Farrell, production designer Simon Elliott, and key makeup artist Lynn Johnston.
• Trailer (HD, 2:07)

Byzantium Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

You may be on vampire overload by now, but if you have room in your brain for one more tale of sad immortality and gory bloodsucking, you could do far worse than Byzantium. Director Neil Jordan is no stranger to the genre—he made Interview with the Vampire back in '94—and his return to it is stylish and self-assured, even if he's working with a lower budget here. Telling a story that spans 200 years, the film mixes jarring violence with the somber poetry of everlasting life. Jim Jarmusch's Only Lovers Left Alive may turn out to be better—we'll see in December—but for now, Byzantium is my favorite vampire pic of 2013. IFC's Blu-ray release suffers from slightly compression-muddled picture quality, but the lossless audio track is killer and the extended interviews on the disc give good insight into the making of the film.