You may be the Only One Left Awake at Only Lovers Left Alive

Jim Jarmusch is the noted American ‘cult director’, and if you were to judge him solely on the basis of Only Lovers Left Alive you’d be minded to think the cult can keep him. It’s a take on the vampire genre, which is fair enough, as who hasn’t had a go, but this is so lethargically meditative and so packed with pompous in-crowd references and such a monotonous yawn that if, by some miracle, you make it to the end, I should warn you there is every chance you will find yourself the Only One Left Awake. Poor you.

Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton star as Adam and Eve, which may mean they were the first people on the planet, or it may not mean that at all. (I can’t be expected to decide the meaning for you; I am not paid enough, and am also quite a busy person.) They are vampires and immortal and have been married for hundreds of years and love each other deeply, deeply, deeply but she lives in Morocco while he lives in Detroit. Why? No idea. He is a reclusive musician, has a thing for historic guitars, sports a heavy-metal hair-do, and mopes around gloomily in a gloomily dark house. They are modern vampires. They Skype. They have iPhones. They acquire their blood in modern ways. Adam acquires his favourite tipple, O-negative, in Thermoses from a corrupt doctor at a hospital. Eve, when not wafting palely though the backstreets of Tangiers, or reading books in any language with her fingers, acquires hers from her old friend Christopher Marlowe, also a vampire, although I couldn’t tell you why he’s aged more than the others, and wasn’t allowed to be all wafty and hot. (The internal logic of this film doesn’t bear thinking about.)