Immortality

IMMORTALITY

Alternately titled The Wisdom of Crocodiles, Immortality (a film from 1998) follows a fellow named Steven who needs to ingest blood from a loving human once every few weeks lest his body break down and stop functioning.  He never refers to himself as a vampire, and he can walk around in daylight, but he is a blood drinker and a killer.  He has a pattern of picking up women, seducing them over time, and ultimately drinking their blood and disposing of their bodies.  When one corpse turns up, a police investigation seems likely to hamper Steven’s style.   The bulk of the story is about Steven’s relationship with a structural engineer named Anne.

Immortality has a promising premise and begins interestingly enough, but the middle drags on with one too many talky scenes of Steven yammering with a cop, and the ending feels anti-climactic.  For better or worse, sympathetic or unsympathetic, Steven is the protagonist of the story, and he wants to drink blood to survive.  After spending so much time watching Steven infiltrate Anne’s world, I wanted to see the protagonist get what he wants.  He does not.  In the final sequence, Steven bleeds to death from a small wound in his hand (his body by then so fragile from not drinking blood that such an injury could do him in). 

I give props to screenwriter Paul Hoffman for attempting a unique take on a tale about a blood-drinker, but Immortality sadly ends with a whimper and not a bang.