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Byzantium (2013) is an odd and beautiful vampire film directed by Neil Jordan. It reminded me a lot of Let the Right One In.

It starts with Saoirse Ronan leaving a journal entry where an old man can find it. They talk, and she goes back to his room and sucks his blood - for he was old and ready to die. Meanwhile, her mum, Gemma Arterton, is working as a stripper when she is attacked by another vampire, who she dispatches and burns. It is time for the pair to move on.

They land in a dumpy seaside town where Arterton goes on the game. She picks up a sad shlub whose mother owned an old hotel, the Byzantium. Arterton convinces him to let her turn it into a brothel, to the disgust of young (though unaging), sensitive Ronan. She has been wandering around town, playing pianos, and enrolling in school because a nice young man (Caleb Landry Jones) has caught her attention.

We get the history of these undead women in flashbacks - Arterton was a simple winkle girl, selling shellfish by the seashore, when sailor Sam Riley starts to take an interest. Unfortunately, so does brutal captain Jonny Lee Miller. Miller takes her to a brothel, rapes her and leaves her. When Riley comes back from voyaging, he has been turned to a vampire, and that sets off the chain of events that leaves Arterton and her eventual daughter turned as well.

The method of turning is peculiar - on an Irish island, there is a stone beehive hut by a waterfall. When you enter... Oh, why spoil it.

The stories converge when the men who despoiled Arterton, now vampires, come after her and Ronan. There are some great action scenes, but that's not really what this movie is all about. For a "horror" movie, there's very little horror. There is a lot about Arterton's eternal life as a prostitute, which seems to be the only job she knows or cares for. But the part I was most taken with was Ronan - just her face, her quietness, her prickly relationship with her mother and her young man - who, it turns out, is dying of leukemia.

So, if you like art-house horror, you should love this.