Gemma Arterton as Clara in BYZANTIUM (Patrick Redmond/IFC Films)

Eleanor and Clara (Saorise Ronan and Gemma Arteton) are family—and bloodsucking vampires. But hold on a moment, are they vampires in the truest sense? Perhaps I’m jumping ahead of myself here.

These two gals find themselves on the run after Clara, the more jumpy, sexualized of the two, kills a man in a very nasty way—beheading him—and they have to flee the crime scene. (Clara dresses in provocative clothes, and with a good dollop of make-up.) And this wasn’t just any man, but someone who knew Clara from another place and another time.

The women find refuge in a small English coastal town at the low-class hotel Byzantium, run by the nice but aloof Noel (Daniel Mays). Eleanor starts to attend school, and somehow, despite or because of her shy demeanor, befriends the very timid and awkward Frank (Caleb Landry Jones). Eleanor isn’t supposed to, but somehow she comes out to Frank: she’s been alive for 200 years and gets her blood from the old and fairly infirm. (They won’t mind, perhaps.) No one can know of her secret. Except, maybe, her classmates since everyone has to write a personal essay about who they are. Ah, high school.

Byzantium is the first trip into this kind of psychological horror that Neil Jordan has made since his first mainstream feature, Interview With the Vampire. Like that movie, we get the story of an impressionable young person brought into a supernatural world, but more so in Byzantium. Eleanor and Clara can walk in the everyday light, and they don’t sleep in coffins. Their transformation process is also different than the usual: they turn into these creatures in a special cave. In the middle of this very dark cavern, they are surrounded by hundreds of bats (a la Christian Bale in Batman Begins).

The structure of the film is both intriguing and slightly problematic. It really works strongest set in the present day, where we see this kind of conventional but nonetheless convincing relationship develop between Eleanor and Frank (thanks in large part to Ronan, who has so much conviction in everything she says) and the two sisters. Clara overprotects for good reason: a cult wants to hunt the two of them down. Why so? Well, this is where flashbacks come in when Eleanor tells her story in the personal essay for class. These scenes are intriguing, especially as Johnny Lee Miller sinks his teeth into playing a 19th century count, who’s a total louse. Eleanor might be walking along somewhere and see a group of people she knows from a century ago, and she then follows them back in time. Yet how Jordan signals Eleanor recalling her past is hokey. A simple flashback would have been a smoother transition.

However, what Jordan cares about, more than the mythology, is how these two females feel and go about trying to connect with others, and that’s where Byzantium will always be a thousand times more worthy than a Twilight flick: if Eleanor and Frank can love, or if he can take the dark route that Eleanor has been on, or if Clara can fulfill what she wants or needs from Eleanor. This is all good, not to mention the creepy cinematography with natural on-location lighting, like Clara stalking at night under boardwalk.