It's World cinema time here at Cine-Apocalypse, today I bring you a review for German vampire film, We Are The Night, a vamp flick that aims to wash the horrible taste of Twilight out of our mouths with it's gore, sex and Gothic style. Check out my review after the jump....
I was actually quite
interested in checking this film out as it was directed by a man
called Dennis Gansel, Gansel had made a film a few years prior called
The Wave, a film about a high school teacher who's unusual experiment
to teach his class what life under a dictatorship would be like goes
completely out of control, captivated me. It was a powerful film
about a powerful subject, so the fact that he'd made a vampire flick
intrigued me. We Are The Night follows a young girl by the name of
Lena, when we first meet her she's a street urchin, stealing from
drug dealers and dressed like Lisbeth Salander from The Girl With The
Dragon Tattoo. One night she finds herself and an underground night
club where she meets Louise, a blonde haired seductress. Louise is a
vampire and confronts Lena in the bathroom and bites her. Lena wakes
up at home in her own bed. She reaches out an arm and the sunlight
coming through her curtains, causes he skin to smoulder. She's now a
vampire. Lena goes back to the night club to confront Louise and
finds not just her but two other women, Charlotte and Nora. They
explain that she's become a vampire and that this is an opportunity
to live a more full life. They take Lena to a 'sex den' where she
goes mental and starts attacking a man, then a all hell breaks loose
and the powerpuff girls have to clear the mess up. They leave the
'sex den' littered with bodies. Hot on their heels is a young
detective named Tom who has developed a soft spot for Lena from a
scene at the beginning. Back at this luxurious hotel, Lena is plopped
into a bath and in a very clever all in camera transformation, she is
transformed from ugly, beaten street urchin into a stunningly
beautiful young woman. Then it's typical vampire movie action and
drama as Lena falls for Tom and the powerpuff girls try and teach
Lena how to embrace her vampirism and to live a glamorous lifestyle
compared to squalid, almost non existent life that she was previously
living, for a while Lena embraces this lifestyle with her new
friends, but as she falls for Tom and the gang starts to break apart,
the film falls into cliché by culminating in a battle between Lena
and Louise on top of a building that looks like a scene straight out
of The Matrix which takes the film out of it's strangely realistic
setting and plops it right into tired fantasy fare.
I could go on but that
would spoil the fun of this film. Gansel has done a great job on this
but there seemed to be something missing. I've seen the film twice
now and I still can't figure out what it is, maybe there needed to be
more back story on the powerpuff girls or more back story on Tom and
Lena but what ever it is, it bogs the film down. The same thing
happened with Ridley Scott's Prometheus, there seemed to be a chunk
of about 15-20 minutes missing that would have made the film so much
better. Don't get me wrong Prometheus is a good film and so is We Are
The Night but like I said it lacked something, but for a vampire
film, it's one of the better flicks to come out in the last few years
or so.
You're probably
wondering why I’ve been referring to the three vampires as the
powerpuff girls, well the characters are like this, you've got
Louise, she's the leader, Blossom is the leader of the Powerpuff
girls, then you've got Charlotte, she's the stubborn black haired
vampire who is very much like Buttercup and finally you have Nora,
the ditzy childlike vampire who is pretty much just Bubbles, all
these characters have personalities which is exceptionally rare for a
horror film and you kind of feel for these characters as they've not
chosen to be these creatures, so you empathise with them, Charlotte
especially, who although very stubborn, was taken away from her
career and family in the 1920s and has had to watch her own daughter
grow old and fragile while she doesn't age. It's actually a very good
scene which does make you feel something for a character who for the
past 70 minutes or so has just been ripping people apart. All of the
cast do very well especially Karoline Herfurth who plays Lena and
Nina Hoss who plays Lousie.
The action is handled
well, there are some pretty good shoot outs and an interesting car
chase and these scenes help the film along at a good pace, but like
said previously it does seem to be missing something. But on the
whole it's a rather satisfying vampire film with all the stuff we
used to love about vamp flicks thrown back in to take the taste of
Twilight out of our mouths, if only there was something a little
extra this would be worthy of four stars but I think three is all I
can give it. It's damn sight better than most of the crap that gets
released these days and I thank Dennis Gansel for giving us back real
vamps. Definitely worth a watch, the film is out October 15th
here in the U.K and it's released by Momentum Pictures.
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