Oskar: "Are you a vampire?
Eli: I live off blood...
[pause]
Eli: Yes.
Oskar: Are you...
[pause]
Oskar: Dead?
Eli: No. Can't you tell?"
Like so many films from that cold and great nation that is Sweden, Tomas Alfredson's Let the Right One In is a film of extraordinary mood and wildly inventive directorial potency. It's a hushed, gentle story of provisional friendship, the ordeal of adolescence, and the curse of vampiric immortality. A hypnotic motion picture from beginning to end, Let the Right One In is a marvel: an ingenious genre film that manages to terrify and endear in the same instant, deftly erecting one of the most persuasive, haunting film experiences of 2008.
Based on the 2004 vampire fiction novel by Swedish writer John Ajvide Lindqvist (and adapted by Lindqvist himself), Let the Right One In tells the story of a 12-year-old boy named Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant) who dreams of revenge on his classmates who bully him at school, and spends his hours wandering around his snowbound apartment complex. One night he meets Eli (Lina Leandersson), a mysterious girl of the same age with whom he strikes up a tentative friendship. As the two learn more about each other, it becomes clear that something is killing off the paranoid residents of the community, but to Oskar, Eli is his friend and confidant, with powers and history he doesn't understand. To Eli, Oskar is a rare innocent soul worth protecting, finding peace in his company and encouraging the boy to stand up to his enemies. Together they bond while the world around them quickly spirals out of control.
I'm sure some of you have heard, Let the Right One In is already targeted for a U.S. remake. Relax, I won't attack the Hollywood machine, I'm beyond that phase, but I will say this: this film holds a distinct European - and Scandinavian - appeal that could never withstand an attempt at Americanization. It observes brutality and naive sensuality involving pre-teens, it treats death with a certain frightening visual poetry, and I'm convinced this Swedish film is something of a masterpiece, directed with exceptional tonal control by Tomas Alfredson. The plot concerns vampires and blood-spattered splendours of the flesh, but I swear it's one of the most endearing and sweetest films I've ever seen, embracing hesitant friendship with total commitment to character nuance and storytelling serenity.
The film is consumed with mood, drinking in long takes of behaviour and staging the action around stark snowscapes, photographed with brilliant menace by Hoyte Van Hoytema. Fearful of losing his audience at the first sign of distress, Alfredson brings Oskar and Eli together gradually, introducing bloodshed without proper explanation to drill the proper psychological holes that pay off later in the film. Eli being a vampire is not the twist of Let the Right One In, it's the opening chapter for Alfredson to play extensively with images of fright and themes of isolation, revealing the girl to be an ancient soul longing for companionship within a life that requires immediate viciousness. The director lets the uneasy sympathy grow from there, enhanced by the heavenly performances from Hedebrant and Leandersson, who never betray their years, making the central relationship awkward, exploratory, and enduring in ways that tap directly into the senses.
Alfredson (again, in the great tradition of Nordic filmmaking) places great emphasis on the unspoken, using inference and oblique approaches to get his point across. Eli's supernatural abilities are rendered through nifty camerawork and old fashioned sleight-of-hand (seeing her knocking on Oskar's window before revealing that it's two stories up, for example) and while the violence is ugly, it largely takes place off-camera. Let the Right One In also embraces the classic checklist of vampiric mythology - sunlight is fatal, if you're bitten and survive you'll become a vampire yourself, etc. - but conveys the particulars solely in visual terms. Scenes such as the morning-after surprise of one of Eli's wounded victims or the effect on Eli when she steps into a home where she hasn't been invited make a blessedly welcome break from the usual expository dialogue which most vampire films indulge in.
Then Alfredson bolsters it with a starkly silent atmosphere. The snow-covered ground is always lit up like a city park, while the sky above is pitch black, suspending the characters between two perfectly bisected halves. In contrast, the story itself entails myriad shades of grey: no heroes or monsters, but a familiar, messy reality heightened by the fact that one of these characters drinks blood to stay alive. Rather than conflicting with the imagery, it forms an almost perfect counterpoint, allowing the film's visual distinction to enhance and accentuate the plot. Let the Right One In contains few moments of overt terror, relying instead on an undercurrent of edginess to convey its supernatural tone.
The aftereffects of violence can be striking and there are tons of brilliant sequences to delight fans of the genre (a terrific shot in a municipal swimming pool towards the end had me speechless), but Alfredson has no interest in scares for the sake of scares. Instead, he combines Eli's gruesome lifestyle with a slice of adolescent sweetness that, supposedly, has nothing to do with vampires. Oskar's helpless anger hides a supremely thoughtful boy, ignored by adults and brutalized by his peers. Eli, for her part, is painfully aware of her tenuous grip on humanity, constantly threatened by animal instincts which demand that she kill to survive. Their connection to each other comes with none of the forbidden sensuality so often associated with vampires. Instead, it conveys simpler links of kindred emotions and shared understanding... coloured by the ominous, unnerving possibility that Eli may be manipulating Oskar for her own ends.
Let the Right One In has such an appealing, candid purity about it that contrasts with the violence on a spellbinding scale. The film takes astounding chances with characters, asking viewers to accept a form of evil (a child, no less) as a welcome presence worthy of compassion. It has a quiet lyricism which sets it apart from its contemporaries, settling over the viewer in alternating layers of creepiness, nostalgia, loneliness, and fulfillment. It never manipulates us or thrusts itself upon us, content to let us discover its treasures on our own. In the process, it quietly pushes the envelope of what stories like this are supposed to be: a feat more shocking than a thousand Hollywood monsters or boogeymen.
Grotesque, unnervingly gentle, forbidding, and ethereally beautiful, Let the Right On In not only re-energizes vampire cinema, but it also restores faith in the concerns of pre-teens. It seats right now on number 3 on my favourites of 2008, and anyone feeling a little punch-drunk from the stale art-house norm owes it to themselves to seek out this stupendous, bizarrely heart-warming genre bender.
Oskar: "You smell weird. Aren't you cold?
Eli: No.
Oskar: Why not?
Eli: I forget."
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