In director Neil Jordan's vampire thriller a mother and daughter struggle to hide their bloody secret from their adopted community. Having survived for over 200 years, itinerant single mother Clara Gemma Arterton and her daughter Eleanor Saoirse Ronan are offered shelter at the down-at-heel Byzantium guest house when they arrive at a rundown seaside resort. Whilst her cold-hearted mother plies her trade as a prostitute to keep their heads above water and indulges her bloodletting at any opportunity, Eleanor wrestles with keeping her secret from her latest love, Frank Caleb Landry Jones. But when the truth finally spreads its way through the local population, the arrival of two strangers belonging to an all-male vampire sect known as 'The Brotherhood' heralds a reckoning neither woman is prepared for.