The mark of a truly great vampire picture is its ability to seduce the viewer into sympathizing with the monsters at its center. This brilliant, mesmerizing Swedish import does just that. Let the Right One In tricks us into believing that its finale is somehow justified. Part of it is that we want to believe. Audiences, after all, love nothing more than to be seduced, and if the downfall can be at the hands of a bloodsucking Lolita, so much the better. But mostly it is the hypnotic performances of the two pubescent stars that lead us down the garden path.
Lina Leanderson’s Eli, the ancient vampire trapped in the body of a waif-thin 12 year old girl, employs a flat, unnaturally piercing, doe-eyed gaze, and precociously suggestive body language, to bewitch both her prey and the audience. Kare Hederbrant’s Oskar, the bullied and unhappy school boy she enthralls, symbolizes all of the repressed angst, resentment, and halting sexual awakening of adolescence. Whenever they are together onscreen, the film burns with a luminous but icy fire.
The film, based on John Ajvide Lindqvist’s wildly popular novel, is set in 1981 and takes place in Blackeberg, an inconsequential Swedish suburb. The title is borrowed from a Morrissey song, “Let the Right One Slip In.” The time-honored notion that a vampire must be invited in to a home before entering figures prominently in the story.
Director Tomas Alfredson, known primarily for his television work, relies heavily on fixed shots of wintertime Sweden; rime encrusted forests, snow-swirled night skies, poorly lit footpaths, windswept frozen lakes. This virtually soundless environment is ideal for the picture’s brooding pace. This is not a particularly suspenseful film. There are few pulse-pounding thrills here. No screaming teenagers hunted down one by one in the woods. No blind flights of panic. No pitched gun battles with gangs of the ravenous undead. No desperate bids for freedom. Nothing like that. Indeed, characters are seldom in jeopardy. It is not the terror of the moment that fuels this movie. It is the growing awareness of what the past has to have been, and what the future must therefore hold. Few scenes in recent memory are as frightening as this film’s closing shot. It combines the nightmarish reality behind the sunny facade with the languid, willfully deluded playfulness of youth. It stinks of corruption, yet maintains a light, almost jaunty tone.
How, you might ask, is that possible?
A skillful director, working off the right script, with gifted players, can turn night into day. This movie is living proof of that old maxim. Alfredson presses all the right buttons. He gives us a sullen but hopeful young boy, Oskar, who is struggling to come to terms with his parents’ divorce, his father’s gently revealed homosexuality, and his mother’s superficial tenderness. He is constantly victimized by the neighborhood bullies. Alfredson then mixes in Eli, a distant, assured, mysterious girl-creature whose strangeness seems to hide compassion, and understanding. The confused, timid love that Oskar starts to feel for Eli draws him into the horrific but surprisingly prosaic workings of her existence. It is impossible to say whether Eli cares for Oskar, or if she is capable of true feelings, though her apparent remorse at Jocke’s death, and the butchery at the pool, do give some evidence that she feels something. Is it love or the practical need for a new human helper? We’ll never know.
The singular beauty of the film is that it blends the cruel truth of vampirism with the magical isolation of childhood. Eli was made a vampire at twelve, and while she has “lived” for decades, probably centuries, since that time, she has not matured emotionally beyond adolescence. Her knowledge and her skill have expanded over time, but not her character. This explains both her unusual dexterity with Oskar’s Rubik’s Cube, and her childlike fascination with it. She is, in many ways, still a little girl. This odd incongruity is the foundation for the relationship between the two.
The natural comparison is to Twilight, the recent big budget adaptation of Stephenie Meyer’s best-selling novel. Both films are about youthful vampirism. But where Twilight is saccharine and sanitized, Let the Right One In is unflinching and emotionally honest. Eli is not a trendy, well-coiffed super-being with an unfortunate but decorously downplayed need for human blood. She is a rank, cold-skinned street urchin who may or may not be suffering spiritually on account of her condition. The films could not be more different. The former is a triumph of media packaging, a glittering John Hughes-like interpretation of high school anxiety with vampiric undercurrents thrown in as a sexy accessory (like, say, a shiny belly-button ring, or a short skirt). The latter is a gritty, dirty, painfully realistic examination of what might happen if a little girl vampire moved into a low-income apartment complex.
The most touching scenes are those involving veteran Swedish TV character actress Ika Nord, as Virginia, a local woman infected with the vampire virus (or whatever it is) by Eli during a violently aborted feeding. Under normal circumstances, Eli always kills her prey after slaking her thirst, to prevent this from occurring. Virginia’s descent into the gray, sunless world of the not yet dead but not quite living is very well done. Her final decision, a noble one, is something to see. That moment, along with the stand-up-and-cheer cat scene, is alone worth the price of admission.
So, at the end, after all your buttons have been pushed, all those awful deeds are over and done, and all those incomprehensible Swedish credits have rolled, it will remain for you - yes, you, sitting in the theater with the empty bucket of popcorn in your lap - to decide whether the smile on your face actually belongs there.
Is there really anything to smile about?
That, folks, is movie making.
EFTI
U.S. Release Date: October 24, 2008
Director: Tomas Alfredson
Screen writer: John Ajvide Lindqvist (from his novel of the same name)
Running Time: 114 minutes
