A sick and twisted vampire yarn

Rating: 6/10 (6 February 2008)

I enjoy vampire films and the first thing that struck me about this particular telling was how beautifully shot it is. This is in part thanks to the wonderful location: a small town in Alaska heralded as the northern most town in America. The film begins on the eve of the last day of sunshine before a month of natural darkness descends on the small town. Following an annual mass-exodus the town population is only a fraction of its pre- and post-darkness size and those that have chosen to stay behind (including a skeleton sheriff crew of two - Josh Hartnett and Manu Bennett) are effectively cut off from the rest of civilisation until the airport and roads reopen when the sun returns.
The suspense at this point is poised beautifully and David Slade does a wonderful job of setting up the anticipation of what is to come, which is effectively a free meal for the pack of vampires that descend on the town as darkness falls.
The vampires themselves are brilliantly conceived; they look horrific and speak in a suitably guttural language that (thankfully) isn't subtitled leaving you as a spectator trying to guess their intentions through their use of body language. This works brilliantly thanks to some top-draw performances from Danny Huston (Marlow) and Andrew Stehlin (Arvin). Just meeting either of these two down a dark alley would leave you babbling like a school-girl.
The stranger who descends on the town prior to the darkness is Marlow's familiar charged with prepping the town for the vampire's arrival and helping to add another dimension to the suspenseful build-up. The stranger is played by Ben Foster who puts in a good enough performance although his inconsistent accent does let him down.
The gore is outrageous and sometimes unnecessarily graphic and the pace of the film is about right although once the killing starts there isn't as much suspense as you would expect considering the build-up. However, this is a minor flaw in comparison to the biggest let-down in this film: Josh Hartnett. Clearly chosen to help increase audience size, Hartnett stumbles through his lines without conviction and never quite seems to fit into his role as the sheriff charged with protecting a town in chaos whilst dealing with the emotional turmoil of a wife (Melissa George played far more convincingly by Stella Oleson) who left him and is now forced into helping him protect the remaining citizens of the town. This emotionally-charged role was too far beyond Hartnett's reach.
There is one other issue with the film worth mentioning: although it takes place over 30 days, it never feels like it. By the end of the film you feel like 48 or 72 hours have past, Slade just doesn't manage to portray the longevity of their struggle for survival and is forced to flash 'Day 17' and 'Day 30' on screen to represent the passage of time. Unfortunately this and Hartnett drag this film from good to mediocre, which is a shame because Slade definitely has talent and I'll definitely be checking out his other directorial work.