MOVIE REVIEW - "We Are the Night"

Darkly Erotic Night Worth Sinking Teeth Into

Lena (Karoline Herfurth) isn’t doing well. The 18-year-old teen is on probation for a number of crimes, not the least of which is for being a particularly skilled pickpocket, using the fruits of her labor to keep herself clothed in rags and barely fed. She been battered and bruised by life in a way most people couldn’t understand, and although there’s a sunny personality just underneath surface trying to break free – a personality intelligent and attractive vice detective Tom Serner (Max Riemelt) got a fleeting glance at during a random bridge-side encounter – it’s going to take an act of God or the hand of fate to see it blossom.



Make that a pair of teeth. Sexy Louise (Nina Hoss) has been around for longer than she cares to admit, looking for women like former silent movie siren Charlotte (Jennifer Ulrich) and rambunctious 1980’s teenybopper Nora (Anna Fischer) to become her immortal companions. She spies Lena by chance, the lost young woman inadvertently wandering into her underground Berlin industrial nightclub, and the moment she does she the insatiable love-starved blonde knows she must have her.

German import We Are the Night is an old school return to vampire norms in the vein of The Lost Boys except with an obvious twist in regards to the gender of the principals. Beginning with a totally kick-ass bang 10,000-feet up in the air, and concluding with a giddily silly allusion to a potential second chapter that will unquestionably never see the moonlight of night, I had so much fun watching this exercise in gory genre silliness I almost don’t know where to begin. The bottom line? Director and co-writer Dennis Gansel (Before the Fall) has made a seriously entertaining motion picture, and one I’m almost certain to add to my hi-def library when it hits Blu-ray at some point later this year.

Does that make it perfect? Heck no. There are undeniable leaps in both logic and continuity that are as harebrained as they are unfortunate. Other than the central relationships Lena has with both Louise and Tom the remainder of the characters remain sadly ephemeral, and other than a wonderful third act reunion between a twenty-something looking mother and her now elderly, barely cognizant daughter it’s not like the other two women at the center of this blood-sucking maelstrom are given much to do.

Additionally, for as much fun as Gansel and fellow writer Jan Berger have playing with vampire convention, at a certain places there aren’t a lot of places for this film to go. You know how it has to end, have a good idea of what the consequences of Louise and Lena’s deathly dance macabre is going to be. There is little surprise to the outcome, and as energetically and as enthusiastically as this final confrontation is choreographed and displayed there is a humdrum familiarity to it that takes away some of the viscerally intense kick and denudes the suspense.

Not that I particularly care. All the actors here are excellent, especially Herfurth, Hoss and Ulrich, each of them enlivening their scenes in a way that had my eyes glued to the screen. Gansel directs with an electric confidence, and even when he’s treading familiar waters he does so in a way that’s always a bit off-center and a little outside of the norm. There are tons of great visual asides and idiosyncratic quirks I totally adored (Lena learning to walk on walls being a particularly awesome one), while the aura of sexually intense hostility he manages to generate between his protagonist is virtually sweltering.

It’s a vampire film, yes, and one where a seemingly lost soul is given the power and the freedom she’s always desired only to discover the plusses aren’t worth the price to her humanity. I’ve seen this story before, many times, and there’s not a lot story-wise keeping We Are the Night from being a forgotten direct-to-DVD throwaway. But the performances are so good, the directing so strong and the film itself so much fun it doesn’t matter that originality isn’t as strong as it arguably could have been. I liked this movie, liked it a lot to be perfectly frank, and if Gansel did make a second one (which I totally doubt) I’d be willing to sink my teeth into it without a second thought whatsoever.