What have you done to me?
I've given you something you never dared to dream of.
What?
Everlasting life.

The Hunger is a truly fascinating work of art, a film unlike much else made before or since. Wonderfully atmospheric, it stars Catherine Deneuve (Miriam Blylock), David Bowie (John Blylock), and Susan Sarandon (Sarah Roberts), who all bring their best, and the opening sequence (complete with Peter Murphey cameo) is one of the best I have seen.

The Hunger is a film obsessed with aesthetics. The storyline is dreamy, almost ephemeral, but that does not matter. The hazy blue lighting, designer clothes worn by Deneuve's character, and haunting music are enough to make anyone forget about Bowie and Deneuve's characters' vampiric atrocities, caught up in the fascination of their unusual lifestyle just as Sarandon's character is. There is an expression used in Donna Tartt's novel The Secret History that I think describes the film well: "the morbid longing for the picturesque." Although both Deneuve and Bowie's characters are both vampires, she is the only one burdened with everlasting life and youth; Bowie, whose life is unnaturally prolonged, is motivated initially by the desire to live forever and finally by the desire to simply die and thus put an end to the torment of his existence. While Bowie is obsessed with his own mortality, Deneuve is equally obsessed with her desire to avoid loneliness, setting her sights on a new companion almost as soon as Bowie begins to whither. For Miriam's lovers, vampirism is both a blessing and a curse, a sickness that consumes them even as it brings them into their own.

Is immortality worth it when the price of eternal life is to become a monster? What if "forever" doesn't really mean "forever"?