This post is the fifth in my 31 Days of Vampires! series for October 2014.
I’d been meaning to watch We Are The Night for a while now, based on my recent exposure to the beautiful, compelling Nina Hoss in the film Barbara (2012). I’d started a Netflix viewing a while back only to flee when I realized it had been compromised by English dubbing.
The upside of this film is: standard vampire love triangle – set in Berlin in present-day. Watch it if you like those doomed supernatural romances. And now – minor spoilers ensue:
Karoline Herfurth plays Lena – a sickly young woman who lives in a cramped flat with her floozy mother, and works grift as best she can. One night at a rave she runs across three glamorous beauties who live a drug- and music-soaked nightlife and inexplicably take an interest in her. Turns out Lena’s new friends Louise, Charlotte and Nora are vampires – each a different flavor: sexy matriarch, self-destructive depressive, and Manic Pixie Dream Vampire Girl (Hoss, Jennifer Ulrich, and Anna Fischer, resp.). Lena has been chosen by Louise, who as it turns out has been looking for another soulmate for the hundred years since her first passed.
So the age-old concern of vampire films: they get bored, and long for meaning. This might have worked out well for Louise and Lena, except coming hard upon Lena’s new life as the fanged undead, she herself falls for a young police officer her smalltime criminal past had garnered. He and his partner are tracking the women down, and gradually coming to realize something supernatural is involved.
The film is beautiful and stylish – just like the women themselves. And besides the two police officers in the film, no other male character has more than three lines. The movie is also flavored with German historical and cultural references – especially with regard to Berlin – and is chock-full of great German filmmaking trivia, largely lost upon me – but which I mention here to put forth this was a lovingly-designed project.
For fans of vampire films – especially those that favor romance and love triangles – this is a must-watch. Just be sure to get the original with subtitles, not the dubbed versions that are easier to find.
