“Review: Gripping Interview with Vampire”

Is the adaptation of Anne Rice’s popular novel, Interview with the Vampire (BBC Two, Thursday, 9pm), biting off more than it can chew? The challenge facing this small-screen interpretation is its competition with the flamboyant theatricality of Neil Jordan’s 1994 rendition of the story – a film that reached unprecedented heights of absurdity when Tom Cruise was cast as the sophisticated uber-vampire Lestat.

Outside of his home country, Ireland, Jordan’s directorial prowess has a varied reputation. He’s viewed more as a dynamic purveyor of oddities rather than one of the greats. Nevertheless, even the doubters have to acknowledge the impressive performance he elicited from Cruise.

In comparison to this unique blend of over-the-top acting and grave directing, the new Interview seemed destined to fall short. Wisely, it establishes distance from the Jordan version by decelerating the story’s pace. By doing so, it has the space to delve into plot aspects that Jordan glossed over, like Cruise’s stint of roof-running in Mission Impossible.

The second season begins with the novel’s vampire, narrator Louis, leaving his guide, Lestat, for dead and escaping to the old world. In a scheduling mishap, Louis (Jacob Anderson) and his vampire charge Claudia (Delainey Hayles, taking over from Bailey Bass) find themselves in Romania near the end of World War II, which was far from a cheerful period. With Soviet liberators wreaking havoc and local inhabitants living in fear of both the advancing Red Army and the unseen beasts in the forest, it’s a tense setting to say the least.

Elsewhere, new television shows on platforms like Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+, and Apple TV+ are poised to entertain audiences in August.

In today’s Dubai, the story is recounted by Louis to a grumpy reporter named Daniel (with Eric Bogosian assuming the role previously played by Christian Slater), in the presence of his vampire companion Armand (Assad Zaman). Their objective is to present a united front to the journalist as a signifier that vampires too, can enjoy a sort of perpetual bliss, given their non-aging nature.

As for Lestat, his whereabouts will be disclosed later in the series, which essentially relays the segment of the film wherein Louise and Claudia travel to Paris and encounter Stephen Rae’s character, Santiago. Despite the comically inappropriate casting, it somehow added to the film.

In contrast to the film, the TV series does not contain anything as absurd as Stephen Rae acting as the vampire mastermind. Instead, viewers are transported back to the horrific period of the Third Reich’s fall and the Soviet’s arrival in central Europe, which is vividly recreated.

Besides being thrillingly macabre, the show marks a shift from the first season’s explicit depiction of the novel’s homoerotic subtext, vis-à-vis the Louis-Lestat organic and emotional relationship. Such aspects were left behind amidst the wartime turmoil. Tom Cruise’s fright wig hysteria is also missing from the adaptation, which still manages to create an engrossingly gory drama despite these formidable challenges.

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