14 year-old Milo, the main character of The Transfiguration, is obsessed with vampire movies, which makes my job here tough - how am I supposed to sound smart referencing other movies when he cuts off my every path, having name-checked them first? I could've written an entire review around how this film reads like a clever update of George Romero's forever under-valued 1978 flick Martin, or how there's a scary sequence lifted straight out of Let the Right One In, but Milo himself, the little whippersnapper, gets there first. What the hell do I say now?
It's a good thing that The Transfiguration is so smart and creepy on its own, then. My crutches aren't necessary and we can walk together, hand in hand, side by side, towards the same gleefully disturbing conclusions -- the ones about the way life can suck you dry and leave you for dead, unless you're willing to do some, you know, sucking back.
The film opens with a dirty joke along those lines, one that goes very wrong very quick, and it had me on my toes from there on - even as it alludes to its bloodsucking contemporaries and forebears I still could never quite figure out where this movie was going, and what a joy that was. Not that it's particularly a joyous film, or that its dark humor ever really manages to suffuse its somber mood - Milo's an orphaned kid in the slums of outer Brooklyn bullied by gang members and looked at with constant mistrust, or maybe just confusion, by his own brother. And it shows.
But there's if not joy so much then at least there's life, red and gushing, to be drained from the film's particularly individual pulse, which quickens with its own measure, never when or how you expect it. The Transfiguration has the confidence of its own self, and stands on its own two feet, right there among greats. It'll fit right in, once we let it.
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