"What all these vampires share is a tendency to swoon. When slaked, they fall back, crimson mouths agape, and the camera hungers after them. In the opening shots, it even spins and descends simultaneously, as if beckoned into a vortex. Swooning, prompted as it is by fear and desire alike, has a distinguished place in the history of horror. (For further details, consult the opening of Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum.”) The master swooners, though, were the Romantic poets, and the pining or sickened souls of whom they wrote, and, in that light, I’m not sure that Jarmusch has really made a vampire film at all, still less a horror flick. “Only Lovers Left Alive” is, at heart, a Byronic riff. It may start with red Gothic lettering in the credits, as if in homage to old Hammer pictures, but Adam and Eve are more like junkies than like predators, and their eternal addiction—to each other, not just to hemoglobin—allows them to float above the fads of common folk."
--excerpt from a full review in The New Yorker
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