If Tom Cruise is a vampire, if he is Lestat from Interview with the Vampire minus the bad 18th century wig, then this performance shows the true success of his career – impersonating someone full of something that looks suspiciously like livelihood.

Maybe that’s why Brad Pitt reportedly hated making this movie. Maybe the stories about Tom Cruise turning up on set having read the entire Anne Rice novel series upon which the film (and 2002’s Queen of the Damned, starring the late Aaliyah) is based are false, and Tom Cruise knew everything about Lestat’s character because he IS Lestat and he paid the cost of immortality by becoming a murderous, blood sucking aristocrat.

This movie is creepy, and mostly because of Tom Cruise and the various Tom Cruise-ish grotesque dolls and animatronics that appear on screen during the movie dripping with blood and displaying various degrees of translucent paleness. The actors in this movie apparently hung upside down for 30 minutes at a time to give their faces unusual blood content. Except for Tom Cruise. Tom Cruise hung right-side up.

There is a religious or moral subtext here. People die and are reborn. People drink of one’s blood so that they shall live. There are eternal children. There is light and there is darkness. In the end, I don’t think it works.

Is it good? Tom Cruise would say so. It feels like an sincere and loyal attempt at telling a vampire story that is at once character-driven and full of camp. It feels spooky without being terrifying. It feels captivating – it builds a world and for the two hours of the movie you buy that vampires exist and kill hookers and put on minstrel shows.

It is an odd choice for Cruise. His first (and only?) movie as a villain. His first (and only?) movie playing a character that doesn’t particularly resemble the Tom Cruise that the world knows. There is only one distinguishing Tom Cruise characteristic:

It feels real.

Next: Mission: Impossible