It’s 1982, and in some anonymous Stockholm housing complex 12-year-old Oskar stands knife in hand before the window in his ginch, rehearsing revenge, or, more accurately, assuming the role of his oppressor. His reflection in the glass is doubled, rendering him ghostly in our first glimpse of him. Oskar is ash-blonde, elfin, soft-spoken, inward, and mercilessly bullied at school by a bunch of boys who look like girls. His parents are divorced. He’s an only child and seems virtually alone in the world. But on this night he sees a strange car pull up. A middle-aged man and a little girl are moving in to the apartment next door. The man immediately sets about covering up their windows with cardboard. For Oskar, who keeps a private scrapbook of news clippings on murder and death, the weirdness and secrecy that surrounds his new neighbours appeals instantly. Soon, this curiosity will turn into heartsickness. Oskar is going to fall in love for the first time.
Preadolescent romance isn’t something typically located in the comfort zone of most movies, but Let the Right One In isn’t most movies. Oskar and Eli will connect the same way a lot of kids connect, through a sense of mutual alienation. Yet Eli’s particular sense of exclusion is more acute, and more permanent. When Oskar asks how old she is she tells him 12… though she’s been 12 for a long time. When he tells her he likes her, she asks him if he’d like her even if she weren’t a girl. He’s puzzled, but that’s just part of love’s delirium. It takes Oskar a while to accept what we’ve by now figured out. Eli is a vampire. This creates complications. But it also places Eli, who recognizes the genuine fascination with blood in Oskar’s murderous fantasies, in the role of his protector.
Let the Right One In, directed by Tomas Alfredson and freely adapted by John Ajvide Lindqvist from his own novel, is something special. It offers a highly original spin on the weary corpse that is the vampire film, yet rather than clutter itself with irony or obvious metaphors, it completely respects the rules of vampire mythology, something evidenced in the title itself. It is hushed, it’s pace methodical. It dazzles even while it draws you in like a hot bath. The sense of isolation felt by Oskar and Eli, so perfectly embodied with childish awkwardness by Kåre Hedebrant and Lina Leandersson, is heightened by the use of very shallow depth of field—it’s rare that more than a single character is in focus at any time. The pervasive snow and night conjure an atmosphere of crisp wintry dreamscape in which colours stand out, vivid and handsome. Close-ups or medium shots are starkly contrasted by static wide shots in scenes of violence, so that the violence plays out before our eyes as though on a stage.
This stylization is woven into the look and sound and story itself. Eli’s guardian –perhaps slave?—gases a teenager in the woods—a more awkward form of abduction is hard to imagine. When he strings up his victim from the ankles are prepares to drain his blood it’s hard not to notice how the woods are lit up like a football field. But Let the Right One In never tries to pass itself off as gritty realism. Many of the special effects are lovingly old school. There’s perverse pleasure in the spectacle of a woman rolling down a flight of stairs covered in rabid cats. It’s the child of Val Lewton, IKEA and Sally Mann, and it's all somehow closer to fairytale, albeit a nightmarish one riddled with ambiguities surrounding death, child autonomy, sexuality and gender—something dealt with explicitly in the novel but wisely only hinted at in this far more subjective treatment. Screw Twilight.
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