Children of the Night (2023)
Directed by: William Stead
Starring: Harry Giubileo, Jay O’Connell, Ivan du Pontavice, Johnny Vivash
Available on: Streaming platforms whose curation team must be asleep
There are bad films. There are silly films. And then there are films like Children of the Night, which leave you wondering not just how they were made, but why nobody involved had the decency to pull the plug before the cameras rolled. It isn’t just that the plot makes no sense, or that the acting is wooden enough to qualify as timber fraud. It’s that the film takes what should be an enjoyably trashy premise—gay vampires in Nazi-occupied France—and turns it into a slow, humourless dirge that neither titillates nor terrifies.
Let’s begin with the premise. It has promise. Vampires. War. Death. Nazis. Repressed homoerotic longing in foxholes. This could’ve been Interview with the Vampire meets Overlord, with a touch of Death in Venice if you were feeling arty. Instead, we get Peaky Blinders meets CBBC, shot through a grey Instagram filter. There is a trench. There are two soldiers: Jim (Harry Giubileo), the sensitive one with trauma, and Bob (Jay O’Connell), the matey one who says “blimey” a lot. They meet a Frenchman called Louis (Ivan du Pontavice), who flutters his eyelashes and flounces about like a cherub somewhat past his best, and his enigmatic father Francois (Johnny Vivash), who frowns meaningfully and speaks mostly in riddles.
It’s around this point that you realise you are meant to be watching a film about vampires, though the film itself seems curiously reluctant to admit it. The creatures appear briefly, lurch about with extended fingernails, and hiss through rubber prosthetics. Some look like they were stolen from a Halloween costume sale. Others just look bored. We’re told they are terrifying. We are also told that Jim is traumatised, that Louis is mysterious, and that Francois has a dark secret. We are told a great many things. We are shown very little.
Let’s talk effects. I will allow that this was a low-budget production. There is a certain charm to a modestly resourced horror film that leans into its constraints. Children of the Night, however, spends its CGI budget on some utterly unconvincing warplanes and vehicles, which flap across the screen like paper aeroplanes on a string. The trench scenes are serviceable, but the Normandy countryside looks suspiciously like Surrey in the spring. Not that it matters—the geography is never convincing, the period setting half-hearted. One gets the impression that the cast had to take their uniforms off after every take so they could be returned to the fancy dress shop before 5pm.
And now, the queer angle. Much has been made, in press blurbs and by the more easily impressed reviewers, of the film’s supposedly “bold” portrayal of gay love in wartime. That would be fine, if it actually had any. What we get instead is the cinematic equivalent of Tumblr fan fiction: two youngish men stare at each other in slow motion while a violin scrapes in the background. There is no bum fun. There is barely any kissing. It is all suggestion and no release. The relationship between Jim and Louis might be described, generously, as romantic. It might also be described, less generously, as subtextual nonsense padded out to fill 90 minutes.
The performances are uniformly flat. Giubileo seems lost for most of the runtime. Du Pontavice plays Louis like an A-Level student imitating Timothée Chalamet. Vivash, who could have been interesting as the villain, delivers his lines like he’s on ketamine. The Germans are all stage Nazis who do nothing much but march about and die. It’s not their fault entirely. The script is so barren it might as well have been scribbled on the back of a cigarette packet. Dialogue lurches between wooden exposition and philosophical rambling. “He’s one of us now,” someone says, dramatically, about 40 minutes too late for anyone to care.
This film has been praised, incredibly, for its “restraint.” Apparently, subtlety is now a euphemism for nothing happening. One reviewer said the pacing was “measured.” That’s one way to describe a film that feels twice as long as it is. Another noted that the vampire design was “Nosferatu-esque.” They meant the teeth, presumably, and not the terror. Because there is no terror. There is no horror. There is just mist, mumbling, and missed opportunity.
There’s also a deeper dishonesty here. Children of the Night wants to be taken seriously. It wants to be thoughtfully atmospheric, and even subversive. But it’s not. It flirts with serious themes—identity, repression, the legacy of war—but never commits to any of them. It gestures at queerness, but never embraces it. It hints at political allegory, but has nothing to say. It wants credit for ideas it doesn’t have the courage to explore.
The only way this film could have worked is if it had gone in a direction it never even attempts. Suppose, just for a moment, that halfway through the vampires and the Germans had to team up against something genuinely monstrous—an ancient horror in the woods, say, or a Lovecraftian parasite unleashed by blood magic gone wrong. You’d have had tension. You’d have had irony. You’d have had something. But this film avoids such invention with grim determination.
I’m not asking for much. I would have settled for a few bites, a few decent lines, a twist or two. Even some good old-fashioned vampire camp would have been welcome. Instead, I got the cinematic equivalent of watching paint set.
To conclude: this isn’t even so-bad-it’s-good. It’s so-bad-it’s-dull. The only horror comes at the end, when we learn that England is about to receive yet another undesirable immigrant.
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