-By Maitland McDonagh

For movie details, please click here.

Poor little Lena (Karoline Herfurth) hates her life: Her mother is a bossy tramp, they live in a dump, and everybody seems to be having fun but her. Already a petty thief and well on her way to getting her skinny behind into serious trouble, Lena meets the two people who will change her life over the course of 24 tumultuous hours.

The first is handsome cop Tom Serner (Max Riemelt), who shows a certain sympathy for the grubby waif, even after she escapes arrest by kicking him in the nads. The other is Louise (Nina Hoss), the seductive but freaky beauty Lena meets and rejects at a midnight rave…though not before Louise has nipped at her throat. By the next day, Lena is jonesing for blood and answers, which Louise and her undead BFFs Charlotte (Jennifer Ulrich) and Nora (Anna Fischer) are happy to supply. “You won’t quench that thirst with abstinence,” purrs Louise as she offers Lena an elegant little glass of blood.

Lena isn’t immediately thrilled at the prospect of being a vampire, but she can’t do much about it and there’s no denying the perks. The transformation erases years of self-destructive living, leaving Lena as perfectly lovely as the others, and the lifestyle is lush: Gorgeous clothes, fast cars, fabulous jewels and decadent fun are all within easy reach when you’re inhumanly strong, immortal and conveniently invisible to security cameras. “We binge, drink, do lines and screw as much as we want and we never get fat, ugly, old or sick!” giggles the impish Nora, though the gravely beautiful Charlotte is clearly less enchanted with the eternal nightlife.

The sticking point for Lena is the endless killing, and if she were willing to commit to being the besotted Louise’s new eternal soul mate, she could go on not thinking about where the blood in those little glasses comes from. But Lena isn’t thrilled about that prospect either, and therein lies the problem.

Directed and co-written by Dennis Gansel, whose previous films range from the sex comedy Girls on Top to Before the Fall, a coming-of-age story set in an elite Nazi boarding school, We Are the Night is no genre-changer. But it’s bloody, occasionally clever and wears its underlying message about the perils of power lightly; it’s a shame the U.S. release version has been dubbed into English, because nothing destroys a movie’s internal integrity faster or more thoroughly.