Director: Dennis Gansel
Starring: Karoline Herfurth, Nina Hoss, Anna Fischer and Jennifer Ulrich
***
Are you ready for a vampire version of Sex and the City? Owing more to glossy 1980s vamp-flicks such as The Hunger and The Lost Boys than to the blandly toothless Twilight series, this Berlin-shot euro-thriller stars Herfurth as Lena, a young petty criminal drawn into a coven of gorgeous female bloodsuckers who run their own upmarket nightclub.
Ageless and immortal, these seductive femme fatales appear to share a decadent high life of infinite luxury, but tensions inevitably surface when Lena discovers their true nature and murderous intentions.
Max Riemelt co-stars as the policeman racing to save her from a fate worse than death. Shot like a high-gloss pop video, We Are the Night is deluxe trash, but visually sumptuous and undemanding fun. Gansel is a young German director schooled on TV commercials, obvious from his supercharged razzle-dazzle style, which lends an unlikely sheen of opulent Hollywood glamour to Berlin's grungy subway stations and crumbling Cold War ruins.
There is a potentially interesting allegorical subtext here about feminist vampires purging the world of troublesome men, but Gansel is clearly less interested in reinventing the clichés of the bloodsucker genre than in delivering a shamelessly shallow slam-bang feast for the senses. Mission accomplished.
