While I enjoyed We Are The Night, it is spiritually the anti-Byzantium for all its superficial talk of feminism. What worked in We Are The Night: the acting, especially the fabulous Nina Hoss, the look, the vampires, turning the tables on pimps. Think Extreme Makeover: The Vampire Edition. I was dissatisfied with We Are The Night’s decision to focus on Lena as she enters the vampire world. I would have preferred seeing the trio in action and developing the tension that already existed in that trio. For all of the head vamp’s talk about independence, there isn’t much in practice, and she has basically replicated the worse aspects of patriarchy that she claims to despise-no consent before converting, demanding “love,” controlling, surveillance, generalization in gender roles.

SPOILER

While I have no problem with the ultimate rejection of vampirism/murder for true love, there is an undeniable bias that the aberrant lesbianism/female sexuality vampire genocidal power structure must be destroyed in favor of a redemptive heterosexual love and the eventual entry of a male vamp who already has the veneer of state authority. We Are the Night wants to ogle hot lesbians then condemn them whereas Byzantium was more interested in breaking all barriers and deftly avoided the lesbian vampire trope in exchange for a mother daughter story. Byzantium’s vampires society proposed that women were prohibited from becoming vampires, but the film also suggested that was only a symptom of a broader corruption in deciding who got let into the club and who didn’t. When they subverted that power structure in Byzantium, they didn’t replicate it and create a mirror image, but democratized it from an elite club to anyone as an act of mercy. More importantly I can’t buy that vamps who are way older get destroyed by a street urchin converted yesterday. No no no. Still We Are The Night was a fun film to watch and I would highly recommend