The Vampire Circus

The circus of the title is an evocative 19th century troupe which weaves magic spells around a naive woodland village in Serbia. For a while, Young (here making his first feature) manages to use this basic premise to establish a delicate fairytale atmosphere, with a genuine sense of strangeness as the circus people gradually take over the imaginative life of the community (isolated from the rest of the world by plague), changing back and forth into animals nightly before their eyes; and he is greatly aided by some unusually restrained performances (from the girls in particular). But sadly the whole fragile effect eventually gives way to formula, and as clichés mount, the fashionably explicit sexuality of the vampires jars badly against the rest of the film. Lines like 'One lust feeds another' can't disguise the awkwardness of the transition from vampirism to sex.