Ever since he emerged as a leading light of the American independent scene in the 1980s, Jim Jarmusch has set his gaze on life's outsiders and eccentrics - whether it be the slackers of Stranger than Paradise, the accountant lost in the Wild West of Dead Man, or the hitman with Samurai pretensions of Ghost Dog.

So it's not surprising that he should find his way towards that most iconic of outsider types, the vampire; nor that his undead protagonists would be ineffably, insouciantly cool.

Jarmusch wastes no time in seducing us into the contemporary but hermetically timeless world of his otherworldly lovers, yin and yang vampire couple Adam and Eve (Tom Hiddlestone and Tilda Swinton).

A revolving camera peers down upon their prostate, luxuriantly locked pre-Raphaelite forms, she startlingly blonde, he dark, both elegantly thin and beautiful and in what seems like an opium stupor. But they're not together, the sequence cutting between the pair in separate beds.

For Adam and Eve are an old married couple - literally, as they've been together since 1868 - who for reasons of individual temperament rather than marital discord live in very different cities.

Adam is in Detroit, where he works as a famed but reclusive composer, Eve in Tangiers, indulging her love of literature and hanging out with the playwright and fellow-vampire Christopher Marlowe (John Hurt) who clearly didn't take one in the eye.

These are not killer vampires, instead buying blood on the black market, Adam sourcing his conveniently from a hospital under the pseudonym Dr Faustus.

They lead quiet, aesthetic lives, employing the knowledge and talents developed through centuries; he collects antique instruments that he first saw played by their original owners, she can tell the age of a guitar just by touching it. Their aestheticism makes such longevity actually seem worthwhile.

Yet while Eve is a buoyant personality, her husband is deeply melancholy, despairing at the way mortals - who the vampires refer to as zombies - are treating the planet.

As Adam's behaviour veers towards the suicidal, Eve decides to reunite with her husband and books an overnight flight (of course) to the US.

Jarmusch's witty, original take on the vampire milieu is a great example of what can be achieved with little budget, but sensitive set and costume design, astute script and acting - all combining to create an atmospheric alternate reality.

There is tension, in part created by the arrival of Eve's sister Ava (Mia Wasikowska), a bad apple who fits the usual neck-hungry stereotype, in part by the threat posed by environmental pollution - if the vampires drink bad blood, they die.

But for the most part the film offers a gentle satire on contemporary society, particularly its emptiness and excess.

"I feel sick," Ava complains, after feasting on one of Adam's nicer groupies. "What do you expect?" snarls Eve, "he's from the music industry."

Hiddlestone and Swinton are very believable as a couple, at once delicate and superior, and the most fetching vampire pair since Bowie and Deneuve in The Hunger. Wasikowska is naughty and impish, and Anton Yelchin very funny as Adam's one connection with the outside world, a fixer and black marketeer who doesn't understand why his best customer never leaves the house.

While not very much happens, Jarmusch's control of atmosphere and tone keeps us transfixed, and hoping that his languorous leads survive their transcontinental travels, in which the key is not so much having the right jabs, but the right transfusion.