Film - Vampires stalk Moscow's dark streets in a grim horror parable. By John Lyttle Night Watch (15)

Call it a conundrum. The Russian zombie-bloodsucker-demon-shape-shifter apocalypse picture Night Watch is almost slavishly modelled on such humongous Hollywood horror-fantasy blockbusters as Blade, Underworld and The Matrix, yet it's simultaneously an unanswerable rebuke to the 21st century's laziest and most bloated of cinematic forms. More and more, the genre is about the latest "hot" computer-generated FX, the best - and worst - that big money can buy. Less and less does it concern itself with mood, meaning, magic. Remember how swept away you were by the first Star Wars trilogy and how irritated and bored you were by the second? Blame the relentless advance of computer-generated imagery. CGI hasn't merely supplanted reality, it's ousted imagination and made bitchy connoisseurs of us all. We've been pelted with prehistoric lizards, exploding planets, flubber and tiny little actors transformed into jolly green giants, and now we're nigh on impossible to impress.

Which is not to say Night Watch is short of spectacle. Far from it. It's just that the tricks are rendered on a shoestring - Night Watch cost barely £2.8m - and are always employed to establish a point. Take the vortex that opens up above an apartment block, heralding the end of mankind and ripping the fabric of space and time. The director, Timur Bekmambetov, is exquisitely judicious. The spinning grey funnel satisfies our primal appetite for destruction, but it's foremost the perfect visual symbol for the suicidal state of one of the block's twitchier residents. Or how about the medieval prologue that kicks the plot into hyperkinetic motion? The vampire army engages the shape-shifting forces on a country bridge, and the subsequent clash equals any battle you dare to mention from any Lord of the Rings. Except that Peter Jackson could afford to pull his camera back, back, back to flaunt a veritable cast of real and digital thousands, while Bekmambetov is obliged to draw intimately close as limbs are hacked, armour sundered and heads decapitated. This is a great time, by the way, to empty your popcorn tub and tug it down over your own cranium. It's not just the director's visual flair you feel moved to applaud. It's his financial prudence. "Sure," Bekmambetov seems to be saying, "my film addresses the eternal struggle for the soul of man, but, hey, why can't I do that on a budget?"

Come to think of it, Night Watch may be the first ever horror film to use cost-cutting as its ruling metaphor on screen and off. It's no accident that the modern portion of the film begins in 1991, when the Soviet empire is melting like the Wicked Witch of the East and roughly 14,420,305 comrades start to experience difficulties distinguishing far right from wrong. We first encounter the nominal hero and tormented psychic, Anton (Konstantin Khabensky), renting a flat and - pardon my French - the place is a shit-hole and the landlady is a witch. Then again, every location in Night Watch is a dump. Forget dark. Moscow is dank: a sullen metropolis of abandoned warehouses, unsafe factories and, memorably, deserted hairdressers'. When Anton and a former stuffed owl - don't ask - race to save a child from a fanged female and find the lift isn't working, it's something vastly more than a punchline when Anton pauses to ask: "What is it with this city? Nothing ever works." He's not joking. Anton's crew rushes around Moscow in a reconditioned canary-yellow ambulance. When the vehicle is flipped 180 degrees, you wonder if the occupants are screaming for fear of their lives or because there's no way management can replace a write-off. Imagine that insurance claim.

Actually, that's not so hard. Night Watch is a work where Good licenses Bad to go about its business. If a bloodsucker wants to "turn" a human, a piece of paper must be officially stamped. I started to giggle - what happens when the vampires demand 24-hour drinking? - but soon remembered the horror film's duty to soak up social, political and cultural surroundings. Try this on. What if Evil is the old Communist Party and Good is emerging capitalism? It would certainly explain why Light in Night Watch is amoral, and perhaps why Evil is more upfront and attractive: better the devil you know. And perhaps why Anton exists in a state of permanent disgust with himself. Or possibly not. Anton chugs animal haemoglobin to bring on his junkie visions, and the supposed murder of his ex-wife's unborn baby weighs so heavy that his shoulders hover somewhere around his waist. He belongs to a much longer and grander tradition of Slavic melancholy. To paraphrase Three Sisters, Anton is in mourning for someone else's life.

Night Watch deserves to be Russia's highest-grossing picture ever. It merits its forthcoming two sequels, though probably not its mooted westernised remake. Well, if Night Watch isn't Dostoevsky meets Dawn of the Dead, what is it? Maybe a Russian Constantine: a video game pretending to muse upon heaven and hell.

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