The Trans­fig­u­ra­tion – first look review

In the last few years, the num­ber of films try­ing to re-exam­ine and reap­pro­pri­ate the vam­pire genre has grown steadi­ly. Apart from the obvi­ous com­mer­cial exam­ples such as the Twi­light fran­chise, a few art films have also left their mark. Tomas Alfredson’s 2008 com­ing-of-age vam­pire-in-the-city Let the Right One In was a huge suc­cess, par­tic­u­lar­ly for its use of the vam­pire motif to explore the body as the place where sex­u­al iden­ti­ty is con­struct­ed. Its influ­ence on this debut fea­ture by Michael O’Shea, The Trans­fig­u­ra­tion, is not sub­tle, even though it is under­stand­able. Alfred­son point­ed the way towards untapped pos­si­bil­i­ties offered by the genre, but O’Shea does not man­age to in turn mine these pos­si­bil­i­ties for clever, or even sat­is­fy­ing, results.

Milo is a lit­tle black boy liv­ing in a derelict build­ing in New York with his old­er broth­er. A soli­tary fig­ure, he spends his time roam­ing the city streets and sit­ting in parks, writ­ing a mys­te­ri­ous book – you guessed it – a guide to The Rules for Hunt­ing. Milo is obsessed with vam­pires and works at becom­ing one. In the open­ing scene, he sucks the blood of a man sit­ting in a pub­lic toi­let, before calm­ly walk­ing home and mark­ing his cal­en­dar. O’Shea choos­es to depict his pro­tag­o­nist accord­ing to how Milo him­self wish­es to be per­ceived: a beast let loose, qui­et yet alert, bet­ter seen from a distance.

Set­ting the scenes of attack for sus­pense and shock, the hand-held cam­era fol­lows Milo in long takes and occa­sion­al­ly stops on his face, but his zom­bie-like impas­siv­i­ty, as well as an aver­age per­for­mance from the young Eric Ruf­fin, make these numer­ous and lengthy close-ups rather devoid of mean­ing. Even though Milo some­times cur­tails his impuls­es, his deci­sion to do so only makes sense as a cliché of the self-doubt­ing, trou­bled murderer.

In a rever­sal of the plot of Let the Right One In, Milo the vam­pire even­tu­al­ly meets an inno­cent girl, Sophie (Chloe Levine), as she moves into his build­ing. Nat­u­ral­ly, Milo first sees her as a poten­tial pray, but Chloe is too kind to him and becomes his girl­friend. It is Chloe who then reveals the film’s core theme: trau­ma and grief. She has become an orphan and cuts her­self, and there­fore bonds with Milo who has too lost his par­ents – his dad to sick­ness, his mum to sui­cide, which he witnessed.

To fur­ther high­light his the­sis, O’Shea makes Milo’s broth­er, Lewis (Aaron Moten), who nev­er leaves his sofa, dou­bly trau­ma­tised – by his par­ents’ dis­ap­pear­ance, but also by his time in the army. Such heavy-hand­ed detail­ing only makes the film more tedious. It runs counter to the real­ism sug­gest­ed by the cin­e­matog­ra­phy and the plot. It is unlucky and iron­ic that Milo should explain sev­er­al times to Sophie that his favourite vam­pire movies are all ​‘real­is­tic’.

O’Shea’s expla­na­tion for Milo’s vam­pirism is in fact a clever idea: killing peo­ple and drink­ing their blood is a way to have con­trol over death. Includ­ing his own, since he believes that vam­pires can­not com­mit sui­cide. Nev­er­the­less, the exe­cu­tion in the last 20 min­utes of the film gives the word ​‘trans­fig­u­ra­tion’ a frus­trat­ing­ly con­fused mean­ing and blurs the director’s vision. Thanks to Sophie, Milo seems to progress towards health­i­er ways of deal­ing with his pain. Yet, for incom­pre­hen­si­ble rea­sons, he sud­den­ly loos­es all control.

Again, the direc­tor relies on the viewer’s knowl­edge of nar­ra­tive con­ven­tion rather than on using cin­e­mat­ic tech­niques to sug­gest that his char­ac­ter is, in fact, ques­tion­ing his pas­sage into nor­mal­i­ty. Even­tu­al­ly, Milo accepts that he could nev­er change and finds a rad­i­cal solu­tion to stop him­self. How­ev­er, this appears ran­dom and illog­i­cal since the entire film up to this point por­trays him as dis­turbed and need­ing Sophie’s help.

A trans­fig­u­ra­tion into san­i­ty is expect­ed, but Milo instead remains a ​‘vam­pire’, and not a more com­plete one than he was at the begin­ning. There has been no real trans­fig­u­ra­tion in any direc­tion, only a rein­stat­ing of this ​‘dis­ease’. The pes­simistic con­clu­sion remains at odds with the director’s roman­tic eye for por­tray­ing the two kids togeth­er, as well as Milo’s grow­ing human­ism. In the end, all has been for noth­ing, and the vam­pire genre’s excit­ing pos­si­bil­i­ties have been wast­ed on a messy script and messier intentions.