“Shall I tell you again about Einstein’s theory of spooky action at a distance,” whispers Adam (Tom Hiddleston) to Eve (Tilda Swinton), his wife of many, many years. Or maybe I’ve misremembered and she’s sweettalking him, so intricately have they wedded their identities. They could be the most perfect couple you’ve ever met, lovers for eons, perhaps the only lovers left alive, just the two of them against the world. You might recognize the feeling – the way they feel, the way you feel watching them hanging out at a club, perhaps like the old Mudd Club resurrected in Detroit, she on his lap, both of them languorous and attenuated. No Wave rock royalty. Just a pair of vampires … Jarmusch has written his best script since Dead Man, its bone-dry wit, neither camp nor twee, a tender, mordant expression of love. Visually, the movie is anything but dry; the sensuous, tactile, deep-night cinematography by Yorick Le Saux (this is Jarmusch’s first digital film and darkness is what digital does best) with its long twisty tracking shots, overhead 360-degree revolves, and car-window views of Detroit, glowing phosphorescent through the blackness, is spellbinding. Only Lovers is awash in music, most of it dirge-like East/West fusion (composed and played by Jozef van Wissem and SQURL, Jarmusch’s noise band). But Adam has a choice vinyl collection and when Denise LaSalle’s great soul voice on Trapped by a Thing Called Love or Charlie Feathers’s down-‘n’-dirty Can’t Hardly Stand It cut through the ambience, it’s electrifying. Feathers and LaSalle are part of an underground history of American song. Toward the very end of the film, however, Adam, starved for blood and waiting for Eve to bring him his fix, wanders into a Tangier dive bar, lured by the rapturous singing of Yasmine Hamdan. It is like nothing else in the film – a woman taking the sound of ancient Islam and making of it something utterly new. Adam and Eve have not yet seen and heard it all. The will to live returns. Survival by any means necessary. Nobody’s perfect, and especially not if they have weird teeth.

Amy Taubin, “Film Comment”, Vol. 50, n. 2, March-April 2014