By Keri O’Shea
Jacob is twenty-four years old, works the night shift as a security guard and – he’s sickening for something. He seems bemused by the physical symptoms which are laying him so low; he has a skin condition, he says, but he eats well and yet his doctor tells him he’s malnutritioned. Perhaps his physical symptoms stem from his general alienation from other people, affecting him psychosomatically, making him feel ill at ease. Whatever the cause, when he seeks to break out of his isolated existence by reaching out to a similarly disaffected soul by the name of Mary, he’s forced to confront his condition as his relationship with her grows. But what is his condition? Mary jokingly asks him if he’s a vampire. Well…maybe. At the very least, as his symptoms start to take him to some very dark places, it becomes increasingly difficult for him to sustain the reality and normality he craves alongside the something else he craves…
Films which explore the humanity of vampires are nothing new; we’ve had, ahem, a very successful uber-franchise in recent years which has taken most of the vampirism out of vampirism for the purposes of examining the relationships at the core of the story. Well, Midnight Son – with all due apologies for making the comparison I just did – shows that vampires can be both monstrous and inexplicable as well as essentially humane. This isn’t a bloodless movie thankfully, however the blood-craving itself is approached obliquely. What we don’t get in this film is any epic back-story about how Jacob came to be what he is, usually inevitably going back to the days of ruffled collars and velvet: in fact, Jacob doesn’t really seem to know what he is, or how he came to be that way. In a nice self-referential moment, we see him going to his local video rental store to check out some vampire movies, before attempting some of what he sees in the bathroom mirror (and what do you know? Crucifixes don’t work). Perhaps a fairer comparison for Midnight Son would be to Romero’s Martin, another film with a sympathetic male protagonist whose condition is ambiguous, even more so than Jacob in fact. But, the sense of lack of clarity regarding the vampirism-or-not allows us to develop a strong interest in the predicaments of the characters facing this issue.
Ambiguity is one of the film’s key strengths, then. But how it works is by framing the other key strength of the film, namely the developing relationship between Jacob and Mary, played by Zak Kilberg and Maya Parish respectively. Zak Kilberg certainly carries off the ‘elegantly wasted’ aesthetic nicely, looking both believably ill and interestingly frail throughout, where Mary’s coke-snorting habit lends a hard edge to her beauty which makes her just as appealing to watch. Together, as they go through the earliest stages of their relationship they’re awkward as hell and thus believable, not to mention rather sweet. I enjoyed seeing how earnestly they seemed to want to get along, and how their natural-seeming conversations ran. Their (significantly) always-abortive attempts to sleep together also permit an original if low-key twist, bringing a revelatory moment for Jacob, and this moves the film’s plot on nicely. Everything here is slow-burn though, and moves along at a dreamlike pace. Just as Jacob is ill and detached from things happening around him, so I felt as a viewer, albeit with a sense of dread, as the movie coolly escalates towards its end point.
…which I expected to be a moment of catastrophe. It wasn’t, and I thought it all concluded in a satisfactorily bittersweet way.
My major bone of contention with a movie I otherwise found very effective was the effect of introducing a certain set of characters who, whilst adding an element of risk to the film which it definitely needed so that it could conclude, felt rather unbelievable and unpolished in comparison to Jacob and Mary, as did the plot line which initially brings Jacob into contact with Marcus. I liked where it went, but certainly not where it started. That said, as a fucked up love story with some engaging sinister touches, I think Midnight Son is a success; it’s an interesting development upon a theme which you might be forgiven for thinking has been done to death.
The UK DVD release by Monster Pictures comes with a host of extras, including interviews with the cast, music featured in the film, deleted scenes and the theatrical trailer.
Midnight Son will be released in the UK on February 13th, 2013, from Monster Pictures.