– Lewis Steals Every Single Scene He’s In –
by Maggie Boccella | Collider | September 30, 2024
Ask anyone who knows me and they’ll tell you that I’m a certified vampire obsessive. I’ve seen just about every vampire movie out there, from Nosferatu to What We Do in the Shadows and back, and even have a tattoo of fangs on my forearm. It’s been like this since I was a kid and my mother let me watch Van Helsing far too young, and I don’t see it changing any time soon.
So, naturally, I’m pretty picky when it comes to vampire films. A lot of them just assume they can pop a pair of fangs on a serial killer and call it a day, but a truly great vampire movie involves so much more than that. There’s a certain legacy to honor, literally hundreds of years of lore to explore and play with and make one’s own. To say the least, it’s hard for new vamp films to breach my list of favorites — which is why I was so utterly pleased that Euros Lyn’s The Radleys was able to join this list.
Adapted from Matt Haig’s YA novel of the same name, the film follows a seemingly normal English suburbanite family: doctor father (Damian Lewis), PTA mum (Kelly MacDonald), two kids, and a white picket fence. The works, so to speak. But a deadly secret hides under the hood: they’re all vampires, abstaining from drinking blood in a kind of monstrous AA program.
They’re practically perfect members of the community, but when Clara Radley (Bo Bragason) has an unfortunate and bloody run-in with one of her classmates, things go south, especially when dad Peter invites his twin brother Will (also played by Lewis) around to help solve their little sobriety issue. Unfortunately for them, Will isn’t the abstaining kind, and their perfect public image slowly begins to crumble as everyone comes to terms with exactly what they are.
‘The Radleys’ Hits a Perfect Balance of Metaphor and Madness
“Domestic monsters” is one of my favorite horror subgenres, though films so rarely get it right — the balance between the real and the fantastic is so thin that it’s far too easy to trip in one direction or the other and completely screw the pooch. But The Radleys rides that white-picket fence with all the grace of a several hundred-year-old bloodsucker, perhaps because it manages to make very supernatural problems into something incredible human.
It’s a fairly obvious meditation on several things, including puberty, infidelity, and sobriety, but not so obvious that it feels like you’re being whacked over the head with a big Bela Lugosi-shaped mallet. Monsters as metaphor is an art I feel like we’ve lost in recent years, with the advent of being able to create whatever we want with CGI. But The Radleys does it with panache, a very intentional set of life lessons packaged in a fun, Gothic-inspired box. It’s darkly comic and deeply English in its sentiment, without leaning so hard into “hey, monsters have problems too!” that any real reflection gets tossed out the window.
In fact, the Radleys try so hard as a family to be normal that the film hardly has to let them off their leash for it to be effective. When they finally snap, they snap hard, and it works in much the same way that Dracula did all those decades ago: by knowing that anticipation builds the worst kind of fear and horror you can find. Horrible things are hiding all around us in our everyday lives, and the film is underscored by a live-wire current of when will it happen, when will things go wrong that complements the family’s darkly funny coping mechanisms like a nice red wine. (Or is it wine at all?)
Damian Lewis Is Having the Time of His (After) Life in ‘The Radleys’
And boy, is its cast having a great time playing up the stressed-out family unit facade. Lewis, especially, steals every single scene he’s in, chomping on scenery like it’s one of Will’s many, many victims. There’s quite a lot of Lestat in the more feral of the two twins, a rock-and-roll Marc Bolan vibe that he seems to be having immense fun toying around with. It’s especially great when paired with his much more subdued performance as Peter, a showcase of his range that gives him quite a lot to bite into, pun intended.
McDonald, too, deserves her flowers for holding her ground next to Lewis’ wildly contrasting brothers. She and Shawn Parkes — who features as a paranoid neighborhood parent — fortify the supporting cast with grounded performances against the morbid hilarity of it all, weaving humanity in amongst the blood and fangs and overall off-the-wall fervor of the film’s third act. There’s nothing more important in a vampire film than the people who bring the legendary creatures to life, and not a single star in the film misses the mark, not even the humans.
The Radley’s YA novel roots aren’t completely invisible under the hood, despite being a relatively dark adaptation of material originally meant for teens — it’s the kind of story I would’ve loved as a teenager myself, and there are points in the script that are drawn out maybe a bit more than necessary to make some grander point about life. The third act probably could’ve been tightened by about twenty minutes, but it’s easier to forgive when the film as a whole gets the idea of a slow burn right. It drip-feeds you pieces of the Radleys’ monstrous nature like an IV of Type O Negative, a better use of vampires and urban fantasy on-screen than I’ve seen in years.
In a world where we’re inundated with new kinds of movie monsters practically every day — I mean, just look at the state of the so-called Poohniverse — finding a film that takes a simple yet effective approach to a creature that’s been portrayed hundreds of times before feels like a boon. The Radleys isn’t trying to overperform, or beat out any of the already recognizable vamps we know and love in pop culture. It’s simply trying to tell its own story, and knows maybe the most important tenet of creating vampire fiction: that, if you put your whole heart into it, nerds like me will fall head over heels for it.
Overall rating: 9/10
A fun and frantic vampire film with darkly comic performances amidst its clever life lessons.
Pros
- The cast, especially Damian Lewis, knocks it out of the park as dysfunctional yet lovable vamps
- The story uses monsters as a metaphor effectively, without dripping over into saccharine territory
- It understands how to use slowburn to the right effect
Cons
- The film could have been slightly tighter to tie up some story elements more effectively
The Radleys will be in US theaters, Video on Demand, and various streaming services like Amazon Video and AppleTV Friday, October 4, 2024, and SkyTV/NOW in the UK on October 18, 2024.
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