Writer-director Scott Leberecht’s coolly detached indie ‘vampire’ movie shares the same blood group as George Romero’s ‘Martin’ (1976): its lead character’s ambiguous cravings are never fully articulated or explained away. Nocturnal security guard Jacob (Zak Kilberg) is hypersensitive to sunlight and an obsessive painter of sunsets. He’s also an addict who graduates from animal blood to human plasma bought from medical orderly Marcus (Jo D Jonz). Is Jacob anaemic, diseased or vampiric? If not the latter, why do his eyes turn yellow when he tries to have sex with coke-snorting cigarette seller Mary (Maya Parish)?
Leberecht’s sensitive portrayal of the co-dependent romance between two lost souls is as compelling as the vampire story. What Jacob and Mary crave is not so much blood or coke, but human contact; yet sexual intimacy threatens to tear them apart. When the film’s crime sub-plot comes to the fore, it gets a tad conventional. Nevertheless, its subversion of familiar genre stylings and audience expectations will satisfy the appetite of any thinking horror fan jaded by the ‘Twilight’ movies.