Daybreakers

As Stephen Fry has noted, one of life’s great pleasures is when something is better than it needs to be, and that’s exactly the case with Daybreakers. What should just be a throwaway piece of Ozploitation hokum ends up being an astute and chilling document of our tumultuous times.

Set in a brilliantly realised future in which almost all humans have become vampires with the exception of a few who are hunted and harvested for blood, the film takes clear visual and narrative cues from the likes of Richard Matheson and endless fang-centric films, but the internal logic and nervy atmosphere are all its own.

Sticking to its rules like a limpet, the film suffers from an occasional lack of narrative momentum and underwritten characters (at times it feels like a TV pilot or the first issue of a new comic), but all can be forgiven for the abundance of ideas and for making bats and dark skies scary again.