Fans of Neil Jordan know that his upcoming "Byzantium" certainly isn't his first time around the bloodsucker block. But the ever curious director was intrigued to try and shake things up, even though it seemed like familiar territory. "It was a chance to return to the territory of 'Interview With the Vampire' and 'The Company of Wolves,' " he told us at TIFF last fall. "I think the whole thing was a great opportunity to really reinvent the vampire legend really. It's become a bit tired of late, you know?" Well, you can see if he succeeded as the first international trailer has made its way online.
The picture stars Gemma Arterton and Saoirse Ronan as a mother/daughter vampire duo, who have wound up in a seaside town, struggling to make ends meet. But when the young girl meets a sickly boy (Caleb Landry Jones) and starts up a relationship with him, his discovery of what she really is sets in motion a chain of events that could change everything. "Byzantium" is as much a relationship movie as it is about vampires, but the mix doesn't always come together. As we wrote in our review out of Toronto: It's "a story that mostly spins its wheels, when not jumping back to overexplain plot elements aren't particularly germane to the story at hand" while the end result "feels as gray and lifeless as the corpses in the film."
But both leads are very good, and there is a decent amount of blood for those looking for that sort of thing. IFC Films will release the movie later this year. Watch below.
