Interview with the Vampire

1994  ·  Film

A vampire sits down with a stranger and a tape recorder, and for one long night he tells the truth about forever.

Neil Jordan directed this adaptation of Anne Rice’s novel with a painter’s eye for candlelight and decay, and it moves through the centuries like a slow procession, all velvet and shadow and rooms lit by fire. Brad Pitt is the vampire telling his story, haunted and grieving. Tom Cruise is the one who made him, and he plays it with a wicked, glittering appetite that steals every scene he walks into. The production design is extravagant in the best sense, and the whole thing looks like an old oil painting brought to life by firelight.

Kirsten Dunst, still a child, is the film’s dark heart, a girl who will never grow up and comes to hate it, and her performance is the one that stays with you on the way to bed. What lifts the film above its genre is its sorrow. It is about the cost of living forever, about love that curdles into dependence and the long loneliness of outliving everything, and it is far more romantic and more melancholy than frightening. Watch it on a dark autumn night, with someone warm, with the candles low.

VERDICT  ·  A lush, sorrowful gothic romance about the price of forever, and the perfect film for the night before Halloween.

POUR  ·  A glass of port.

Pairs with: Watching Interview with the Vampire Together