Martin (John Amplas), a young man who looks around 20-years-old, boards a train in Indianapolis, Indiana for New York. At night, he breaks into a sleeping car and sedates a woman with a syringe full of narcotics. She struggles, but he tells her not to struggle or be upset because she wont feel pain. After a few minutes, the woman falls asleep, and Martin has sex with the unconscious woman. Afterwards, he slices her wrists with a razor blade so he can drink her blood. The woman bleeds to death in her sleep.
In the morning, the train stops in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania where Martin disembarks. He is met by Tata Cuda (Lincoln Maazel) an elderly and hostile old man who claims to be his cousin from the Old World. Together, they travel by another train to the town of Braddock, a dying industrial suburb. They walk to Cuda's large house where he shows Martin his living quarters. Cuda then accuses Martin of being an 84-year-old vampire from his old country. He has taken in Martin because he is family, but tells him, "First I will save your soul. Then I shall destroy you." Martin denies being a vampire and implies that Cuda is merely his uncle rather than his cousin. Cuda then puts up strings of garlic on the doors to his and his granddaughter's room, and then holds up a small cross when Martin approaches him. Martin takes away the cross, and even takes a bite of the garlic mocking these attempts by saying bitterly, "There's no real magic... ever". Cuda tells Martin that he can come and go as he pleases. But he also warns Martin that he will kill him if he kills anyone in Braddock. He also tells Martin to stay away from his granddaughter Christine (Christine Forrest), whom arrives home from her job that evening.
Cuda introduces Christine to Martin, but also warns her to stay away from him. But Christine instead strikes up a friendship with Martin who confides in her about his vampire heritage. When Cuda later confirms Martin's claims to be a vampire, Christine, not surprisingly, refuses to believe either one. She thinks that Cuda and the other members of her family have driven Martin to insanity by making him think that he is a vampire. It is never revealed if Martin really is a vampire, or just a shy and lonely youth with troubled issues. Christine is the only person that Martin gets the courage to talk to. When Christine's boyfriend Arthur (Tom Savini) arrives at the house for dinner, Martin stops talking and backs away despite Arthur's attempt at a conversation. Christine later confides in Martin that she hopes to leave Braddock someday with Arthur, even though Martin points out that Arthur treats her badly and is both verbally and physically abusive towards her.
When Christine sees that Martin won't talk to anyone else, she buys him a phone which he installs in his room. Martin begins to repeatingly call a radio talk show where he describes what it's like to be a vampire. He becomes known on the radio as "the Count" to all the listeners. But the patronizing host (Michael Gornick) thinks he's just crazy.
Martin gets a job at Cuda's grocery store of stocking shelves, hauling boxes around, and even gets to be a delivery boy for some of the customers. One of his customers is a certain Abby Santini (Elyane Nadeau), who becomes taken in with Martin. She is a very friendly young woman who is depressed when she tells Martin that her husband is unfaithful. But Martin still does not have the nerve to talk with her, so she is happy to have someone to confide in with her life problems. Martin phones the radio show host to describe his infatuation with the housewife and senses that she wants to have sex with him. When the radio show host asks Martin if it is a sexual problem that he has involving women criticizing him during sex, Martin replies that he has never had sex with a woman who was awake.
One day, Martin travels by train to outside Braddock to look for victims. At a supermarket, he follows a young woman (Sarah Venable) home to her posh suburban house. He sees the woman's husband (Richard Rubenstein) leave for a long business trip, and Martin decides this would be the right time for more feeding. Martin returns to the house after dark and breaks in through the garage door. But it is Martin who gets the surprise when he bursts into her bedroom to find her in bed with her adulterous lover Lewis (Al Levitsky). After a vicious struggle, Martin jabs both of them with hyprodermic needles with narcotics, and waits for the drugs to take affect. He drags the unconscious body of Lewis from the house to a clump of trees across the street where he kills him by shoving a broken tree branch into his neck and drinks his blood. Martin returns to the house where he has sex with the unconscious woman. But out of compassion and pity, he decides to let her live.
Martin begins to have romantic monochrome visions of his vampire past (real or imagined), where he drained blood from a young woman and was chased through the streets of a nameless European town by a torch-lit mob.
During one Sunday at church, Cuda brings home Father Howard (George A. Romero) who asks him about the possibility of exorcism and demon possession. Father Howard calls upon the elderly Father Zulemans (Clifford Forrest, Jr.) over at Cuda's request. Together, Cuda and Zulemans confront Martin his bedroom and attempt to perform an exorcism on him. At this point, Martin remembers (another real or imaginary flashback), in the Old Country of people trying to perform an exorcism on him, and he flees them. Martin then flees from Cuda and Zuelmas as well. A little later that night, Martin terrorizes Cuda in a children's playground when he puts on a Dracula cape and puts false fangs into his mouth to pretend that he really is a vampire.
One day, Martin finally musters the courage to talk with Mrs. Santini during a routine delivery to her house where he tells her that he's aware of her attempts to seduce him and wants now to have sex with her. After having sex for the first time, Mrs. Santini becomes more depressed for she tells Martin that her husband just left her because she discovered that she cannot bear children, and that her desires towards him are based on sex and nothing else. But Martin wants to stay with her and help her move on with her life. Martin tells the radio show host about his affair with the housewife and that he no longer has the urge to attack other women.
Meanwhile, Arthur meets with Cuda and tells him that he wants Christine to leave town with him so they can get married and start a family. But Christine becomes angry at Cuda when he tells Arthur that insanity runs in their family and he shouldn't consider having children with her. Shortly afterwards, Christine packs up and leaves Braddock for New York with Arthur despite Martin telling her that Arthur is abusive towards her. But her mind is made up. Before leaving, Christine tells Martin that she really has no ill feelings towards him and just wants to make a fresh start with her life. She says goodbye to him and promises to write. But Martin knows that with an abusive and possessive man in Christine's life, she probably won't.
Depressed over losing his one true friend, Martin phones the radio show host and tells him that he's getting "shaky" and wants to go out looking for more victims. That night, Martin travels to a rough crime-ridden area of Pittsburgh and attacks two derelicts in a alley, injecting them with narcotics. He kills one of them by silting the bum's wrist and drinking his blood. Martin is about to kill the second one when a police car shows up and gives chase. Martin narrowly escapes during a long chase on foot which leads from the garbage strew streets and through a local store. Martin runs into an old warehouse where a drug deal is going down. A shootout between the two cops and the three thugs begins where all of them are killed, leaving Martin as the sole survivor who casually walks away from the carnage.
One day, Martin finds Mrs. Santini dead in her bathtub, after she had slit her writs with a razor blade. Martin anonymously calls the police to report the body and leaves. He phones the radio show host one final time to say that he really doesn't need friends or people to talk to for he is his own person. But when Cuda learns about Mrs. Santini's suicide, is mistakenly thinks Martin killed her and made it look like a suicide as he's done before. Cuda walks into Martin's room while he is asleep and kills him by hammering a wooden stake through Martin's heart.
Cuda buries Martin's body in his back garden, while over the closing credits various voices from people are heard talking to the radio show host asking the whereabouts of "the Count".
再一次问为什么没有半分制度 我要给两点五
保罗施拉德擅长用对话做人物状态，这两年的电影都有对伤痕的救赎，但表现出来却浅显了许多，心理惊悚可不是他擅长做的啊。搞下来，台词和心理推动都不太好
cliché，很多地方情感处理得有点尴尬，看得我有点脚趾扣地
主角在伊拉克的过去不由自主地让人想到施罗德前作《第一归正会》。可惜这次没有个有趣、新鲜的想法，没有耐人寻味的人物。况且主人公的过往、外在冷静、叙事的一般套路以及不最亮眼的结局，令人失望。
Sep 9, 2021, Hi-pointe
近期看过的最喜欢的一部欧美爱情片！养眼的男女主，复古温暖的滤镜，让人舒适的取景，有趣的故事和主角有趣的灵魂～一定会再二刷的电影！
颜值满满，时尚欢乐，节奏轻快，音乐动听…都市浪漫爱情故事，看得很开心
我在另一家出版社要把你挖过来
“一天天不好好工作在本子上画叉叉（ modern Darcy”
男女主还是有点化学反应的，男的前半小时还不错，但后面两人谈开了反而气场不足了，没之前帅了！原来定位小清新电影，女主很有主导的感觉
男女主的化学反应真是没得说。好久没看过这种俗得我很喜欢的电影了。
鱼眼广角和包家具的视觉效果是有意思的，除此之外难免有些无趣。
一边打竞争法笔记一边听生肉都能知道剧情以及男女主之间巨老套的七七八八 当然是深夜肥皂剧范畴 但不得不说女主真的好漂亮！
Sep 9, 2021, Hi-pointe
Final week 复习作死看的电影// 看了小说一定会看电影的人就是我/// 蛮甜的
看到一半：请问《算牌人》内地买家/投资人还好吗？看delivery的时候是不是已经哭晕在厕所了 这纸面的vision以及卡司和制片的flare 是不是和成片差距太大? I can feel your pain half way through the film. 看完全片：what the heck is this shit!
就当是一部装修杂志来看吧，里面的装修风格非常的标准美式工业风。
情人节看完 情节很老套 但中间剧情和台词还不错
为了取得职业中的成功，二人开始了一场从外到内的较量与竞争，但是偶然的一次电梯事故，使二人的竞争关系发生了微妙的改变。
很难再有如施拉德这般的创作者，一生中轮回一般的拍摄同一部电影：于过往伤口的裂隙中，洞悉魂灵流放的准则，但严格的自我鞭笞与暗示践行却仍无法放下赎罪的执念，舍弃掉成为幸福之人的机会，重新撕开疤痕下从未愈合的伤口，以自毁完成受戒，实现神迹的手动圆满。现代社会中精神世界远离宿命信仰的人们无法逃脱的虚无焦虑，成为对黑色电影语汇的超验，奥斯卡·伊萨克与先前《美国舞男》《迷幻人生》《第一归正会》中的男主角们高度重叠，喃喃自语，背负原罪，在自我封闭的冥想炼狱中写下孤独存在的证据，并迎接那亘古不变的布列松式结局——触不到却存在的稀薄的温存。舞男、毒贩、神父和赌徒，不同身份象征却陷入相似的困顿，几十年来，支撑施拉德坚持拍摄这些寓言的又是什么，新好莱坞的伤逝，美利坚的幻灭，他又何尝不是自己笔下镜头下的那些角色呢。
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