‘The Radleys’ Edinburgh International Film Festival 2024 Review: An Interesting But Ultimately Shallow Modern Vampire Tale
It may come as no surprise that The Radleys, which stars Damian Lewis and Kelly Macdonald as sober vampires assimilated into non-blood-sucking society, is adapted from a young adult novel. Over a decade ago, author Matt Haig published a British suburban vampire story that was eager to be part of the canon of fiction playful with vampire tradition (every one of these post-modern vampire tales requires at least one scene of a vampire explaining what parts of the lore are accurate). The film adaptation keeps the younger demographic in mind; it’s unafraid to be explicit when it needs to be, and there are plenty of scenes of burgeoning sexualities merging with vampiric urges, plus a few shots of a frightened teen doused in the blood of their first kill. Classic stuff.
The strength of young adult genre fiction is that it can be playful with the darker elements of its story, leaning into shadowy worlds that inspire trepidation and curiosity in the teenage characters and then sharply pulling back from unpacking the truly uncomfortable psychological turmoil that these dark worlds would inflict. Young adult horror is not limited by picking and choosing when it gets full-on and scary; this tonal agility is its main strength. In the case of The Radleys, a sporadically charming look at an unremarkable middle-class family coming to terms with their vampirism, director Euros Lyn and screenwriter Talitha Stevenson use sexual becoming, frigid marriages, and substance abuse as shorthand to unpack the problems that come with revealing that the entire family can only be truly satisfied by drinking blood.
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Sometimes these real-life topics are referenced comedically, sometimes with sincerity, and it’s here that a common vampire fiction dilemma arises. The Radleys doesn’t know what to do with a catchy vampire metaphor. The more the film thinks about vampire feeding as substance abuse, the more cracks begin to show.
The Radleys are Peter (Lewis), a family physician, Helen (Macdonald), the nervous mother, and children Clara (Bo Bragason) and Rowan (Harry Baxendale). The outsider status keenly felt by the quiet children (the label “freak” hangs over them at all times) is both confirmed and inverted by the revelation of their true biology, which emerges when a local boy tries to rape Clara and she responds with superhuman strength and incisors to his neck. The plot thread dealing with the pressure from law enforcement, backed up by the vigilante efforts of Jared (Shaun Parkes), a suspicious neighbor obsessed with vampire conspiracies, is woefully underdeveloped, too lumbering and underbaked for us to ever feel the walls closing in on the family.
Damian Lewis and Helen Macdonald certainly seem game for the bumbling hijinks and more sincere drama that consumes the long-suffering married couple. But their energy feels noticeably off. Lewis delivers every line from the smallest mouth imaginable, and Macdonald’s spiraling anxiety is too one-note to let Helen feel like a truly fluid and immediate character. Their stilted dynamic should ostensibly be energized by the arrival of Peter’s identical twin brother Will (also Lewis), whose faded rock-star vibe and ramshackle campervan promise to stir bad boy life into the dusty character dynamics. But veteran TV director Lyn paces his scenes too sluggishly, shoots them too flatly, and cuts them too unenthusiastically to give the film the pulse it needs.
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The Radleys is most engaging when Clara and Rowan’s unsynchronized coming-of-age journeys are injected with sexual confidence, dark impulses, and queer desire. Bragason and Baxendale become the beating heart of the film, especially as their shared attraction to Jared’s son Evan (Jay Lycurgo) gives the film some well-needed YA juice. But The Radleys ultimately comes undone by its inability to figure out what its central metaphor actually means.
The motif of vampiric sobriety is hammered home with an addiction helpline and a many-stepped program, but it clashes with Clara and Rowan’s stories of becoming: is drinking blood inherently corrupting, or a natural part of biology that should be accepted? Sobriety deserves a fair treatment in genre cinema, but in any vampire film, we’re more willing to indulge in violent tendencies – where does the film stand on living a normal life as a vampire? It’s unclear by the film’s ending, which uses the malign influence of Will as a scapegoat for any of the story’s thorny, unanswered questions. Even though it comes alive when we focus on the entitled and lively stories of supernatural teenagedom, The Radleys is both too careful and careless to leave a lasting mark.
Summary
The Radleys is an interesting take on vampire life that ultimately comes undone by its inability to figure out what its central metaphor actually means.
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