Let The Right One In

Let The Right One In

By Jonathan Fisher, April 16th, 2009


Let The Right One In turns the contemporary notion of what a 'vampire' movie should be right on its head. There's been a tendency in the movies recently to highlight the vampire's sexy side -- Twilight, Blood and Chocolate, and the Underworld films are three examples of this. Most movie-goers today have forgotten, or didn't know in the first place, that vampires were conceived as being the stuff of nightmares, and not only because they preyed on human flesh. There's something terrifying about an eternity of loneliness and restriction to the night, and that loneliness is what drives the earliest stories, including Bram Stoker's great novel Dracula.

Let The Right One In is a slow-burning, grim story about a lonely young boy named Oskar (Kare Hedebrant) whose parents are separated, has trouble with bullies at school and spends too much time alone. Outside his lower-class apartment one icy Swedish evening he meets a girl named Eli (Lina Leandersson), about his age. They talk and form a friendship of sorts.

Spoilers follow: After noticing several peculiarities about Eli, Oskar discovers that Eli is a vampire. "Are you really my age?" He asks her. "Yes. But I've been this age for a very long time." Oskar discovers that vampires must be invited into one's house before they can enter -- the piece of vampire mythology from which the film gets its name. Eli hangs around with a middle-aged man named Hakan (Per Ragnar), whose relationship to Eli is never completely explained, but we get the sense that a greater mythology and history with these vampires is suggested than in most films featuring these creatures of the night.

Let The Right One In, directed by Swede Tomas Alfredson and written by John Ajvide Lindqvist, was cruelly overlooked in the Best Foreign Language Film category at this year's Oscars. It transcends genre -- it is a horror film with an emotional core, a relationship drama that just happens to be about two young children, one a vampire. It is often horrifying, occasionally funny, but perpetually hypnotic. Alfredson directs with a cool detachment that matches the state of mind of both Oskar and Eli. Oskar has been ground down into subdued desperation by what has happened to him in his short life, Eli has lost nearly all trace of humanity by virtue of spending several hundred years as a 12-year-old. But her instinct is to protect Oskar at all costs -- a stark change from this year's other teenage vampire-based movie Twilight, where the male vampire wants nothing more than to sink his teeth into his girlfriend's supple neck.

Despite the grim setting (it's amazing no one else has thought to set a vampire film in the Swedish snow) and subject matter, Let The Right One In is quietly moving. Rumour has it that it's going to be remade for American audiences, as if they wouldn't be able to understand this Swedish original. See this version before it becomes Twilight with 12-year-olds.