The dumb, pretentious script is served up straight, with absolute sincerity and triple-distilled formal and thematic purity, by what may be the most beautiful and powerful direction of any 1995 American feature. Ken Kelsch’s nocturnal black-and-white cinematography is sometimes breathtaking enough to justify the Dostoyevskian conceits of the dialogue (“The entire world’s a graveyard, and we’re the predators picking at the bones”), and the performances by Lili Taylor as the grad student and Christopher Walken (in only one scene) as a fellow vampire have comparable voltage. The mood of Catholic despair and excess is often close to that of Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant, but it’s even more metaphysical and delirious.
*
