Five-Legged Iguana

A Rundown of the 13 (+1) Best Horror Movies I've Seen in the Past Year

[6 of 13]

BYZANTIUM

(September 2012)

“My story can never be told. I write it over and over, wherever we find shelter. I write of what I cannot speak… The truth.”

So, my Neil Jordan Top Three (The Company of Wolves, The Crying Game, and The Butcher Boy) is now officially Four.

Welcome, Byzantium.

Based on Moira Buffini’s play A Vampire Story (Buffini ably adapts her own work for the screen), Byzantium follows the apparently sixteen-year-old Eleanor Webb (Saoirse Ronan) and her “legal guardian,” Clara (Gemma Arterton), both long-lived immortals who subsist on human blood, and who are both on the run from some looming threat whose exact nature Clara refuses to divulge to Eleanor.

Jordan scores here with an excellent cast (which includes Caleb Landry Jones, Sam Riley, and Jonny Lee Miller), some elegant Gothicism, and some brief, yet powerful phantasmagorical moments.

There’s also some noteworthy cinematography by Sean Bobbitt, as well as a score by Javier Navarrete (who also scored Guillermo del Toro’s El Espinazo del Diablo and El Laberinto del Fauno, the latter of which garnered him a whole slew of award noms, including the Oscar).

(Byzantium OS courtesy of impawards.com.)