Avis des critiques

It's a small movie harboring big ideas about loss and how to make up for it. Its reach exceeds its grasp, but the stirring fits of imagination and truth make the attempt worthwhile.

While The Transfiguration doesn’t reach Martin’s heights, O’Shea’s Brooklyn-set film does exert its own queasy pull.

O’Shea is stronger as a writer–director when he concentrates on the relationship between Milo and Sophie, whose emotional lives are rendered honestly, and on navigating the story’s uneasy relationship to its genre.

It drew interest partly through sheer surprise: the 42 year-old had never shot a metre of film before turning his hand to this work. His ambition to make a "realist" vampire film set in the Rockaways, featuring a 14 year-old black kid called Milo who is convinced he belongs to the undead, is laudable, if overtly signalled by the protagonist on a repeated basis.

The pessimistic conclusion remains at odds with the director's romantic eye for portraying the two kids together, as well as Milo's growing humanism. In the end, all has been for nothing, and the vampire genre's exciting possibilities have been wasted on a messy script and messier intentions.