For a film with a seeming identity crisis – is it a quasi-lesbianic Cinderella story in reverse? a gory vampire romp? an all-out action-packed extravaganza? – German writer/director Dennis Ganzel’s We Are The Night, a tale of female vampires living the good undead life, proves to be an eminently enjoyable way to spend 100 minutes. It may not go down in history as a genre-defining film, but it’s a well-executed cinematic slice of eye- and ear-candy sure to entertain anybody with – or without – a pulse.
A superb title sequence featuring various images of the film’s three main vampires throughout history – the leader, Louise (Nina Hoss, The Anarchist’s Wife), is over 250 years old – set to a haunting tune is followed by an unsettling and effective opening scene aboard an airplane that introduces the audience to the vamps in the present and to Louise’s quest to find the reincarnation of her one true love and turn her. From there, via an intense chase sequence, the audience is introduced to Lena (Karoline Herfurth, A Year Ago in Winter), a young pickpocket who spends as much time evading police as she does avoiding her mother. When a despondent Lena enters an underground nightclub in an abandoned amusement park and Louise, who organizes these raves in the hopes of finding The One, sets eyes on her, the die is cast for a Bacchanalian celebration of all the things that make vampires cool (sex, drinking, and drugging without any worries about the after-effects), with an underlying theme of the loneliness and longing that come with it. Needless to say, Louise believes she has found what she’s looking for in Lena and quickly turns her, resulting in some fine scenes of Herfurth’s transformation from a grimy street scamp into a gorgeous vampire, all while she fights it, and then eventually accepts and even revels in her new self.
As enticing as the four leading ladies are to look at, they also display some chops in their performances. Hoss and Herfurth are spot-on in their depictions of, respectively, a strong leader who’s also a lost-soul looking for true love and a young woman wrestling with her conflicting emotions about what she’s becoming. The stunning Jennifer Ulrich, in what should prove to be be a breakout role, portrays Charlotte as a brooding and icy intellectual, but a scene in which she visits with a long-lost relative is the film’s most heart-wrenching moment. Anna Fischer (Groupies bleiben nicht zum Frühstück) plays the bubbly Nora as a hard-partying, fun-loving girl who struggles with her emotions when she becomes smitten with a doorman at their hotel; she must reject him for fear of hurting or killing him if she gets close to him. And Max Riemelt, a regular in Gansel’s films, holds his own as Tom, the police officer who falls for Lena even as he hunts down a group of miscreants (guess who) who have been leaving a wake of carnage among the city’s seedy underbelly.
Gansel, whose comedy Girls on Top and drama The Wave are both well-regarded films (especially the latter), makes his first foray into horror with We Are The Night and it’s an idea he claims to have come up with 15 years ago, when he wanted to put a new spin on the vampire genre. The story, while not the most original – it is reminiscent of The Lost Boys and Blade (and even, to some degree, Sex and The City) in its Dionysian party scenes and of Run Lola Run and the Fast and Furious franchise in its action sequences – somehow doesn’t feel like a retread of any of those films, perhaps due to its unique premise of a world where only a handful of female vampires exist around the world due to their male counterparts’ failure to rein in their selfish desires and thirsts for power. Gansel keeps the action flowing throughout yet manages to keep the bizarre love triangle between Louise, Lena, and Tom in the foreground as well.
For a country with a rich history of genre cinema boasting such classics as Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, and Fritz Lang’s sci-fi masterpiece Metropolis, it’s surprising that Gansel had a hard time procuring funding to shoot We Are The Night. In fact, only after the huge success of his The Wave did he manage to get a realistic shooting budget that would do his ideas justice. And even though that budget was by no means huge, the final product looks and feels like a Hollywood blockbuster thanks to some very good use of CGI as well as the work of Gansel’s regular crew, particularly the rich cinematography of Torsten Breuer, the German Film Awards-nominated editing of Ueli Christen, and the similarly-honored score by Heiko Maile. As mentioned earlier, the film is most definitely slick, a feast for the eyes and ears.
If We Are The Night has any flaws, it is that it is a little over-ambitious: trying to cram an intricate love story, balls-to-the-wall action, a police investigation, somewhat gory killings, and a group of hard-partying feminist vampires into a less-than-two-hour film can only end up leaving something to be desired. Despite this, We Are The Night, which IFC Films recently released in North America on VOD with a limited theatrical run as well, is good enough to recommend to anybody looking for some slick adult vampire action as opposed to the shoe-gazing glimmering teens of the current vampire fad.
