The Trans­fig­u­ra­tion

This is what you might call a revi­sion­ist vam­pire movie, in that it is very much like a nor­mal vam­pire movie but with­out the eroti­cism or excite­ment. Pur­pose­ful­ly so. Writer/​director Michael O’Shea has cho­sen to trans­pose the clas­sic blood­suck­er yarn to an inner-city hous­ing project, but there’s lit­tle more to it than that.

Eric Ruffin’s latchkey teen lon­er Milo makes for a low-key cen­tral pro­tag­o­nist, one with whom you are urged to extend sym­pa­thy even while he’s engag­ing in all man­ner of extreme­ly wicked busi­ness. He skulks around look­ing like he’s con­stant­ly on the verge of tears, and speaks with a soft, neu­tral pitch redo­lent of a tran­qued-up guid­ance coun­sel­lor. You sim­ply don’t expect him to spend his evenings sneak­ing up on lone pedes­tri­ans with a con­cealed craft knife up his sleeve and then bleed­ing them dry, direct from the jugular.

A whirring, oscil­la­tor sound is used on the sound­track as a way to
sign­post any upcom­ing nas­ties, but the film works to try and make the suc­ces­sion of killings as banal and anony­mous as pos­si­ble. The one vic­tim who does get a moment to shine is look­ing to score drugs, so in the film’s strange­ly moral­is­tic uni­verse, deserves to perish.

Young or old, black or white, every­one is a poten­tial source of restora­tive blood for Milo, but the fact that he extends no sym­pa­thy for his vic­tims is nev­er explored in any real detail. Milo spends much of his down­time watch­ing vam­pire themed movies, record­ed from the tele­vi­sion onto bat­tered VHS tapes.

He reg­u­lar­ly namechecks the films he likes – George Romero’s Mar­tin, Tony Scott’s Near Dark, Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In, which comes across as O’Shea want­i­ng to broad­cast the fact that he’s done his home­work. There are plen­ty of sick burns at the expense of the Twi­light movies, which is absolute­ly fine by us.