Let The Right One In - review

After seeing both The Wrestler and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button in the space of a week, I feel like I've run out of superlatives to heap upon further movies. But alas, it's time to get the thesaurus out because I've seen my third utterly astounding movie of the week. And it's all the more incredible for being a micro-budget Swedish vampire movie. Strap yourself in, because I'm afraid I'm about to wax all lyrical...

Adapted from the best-selling novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist, Let the Right One In tracks the quiet movements of a small Swedish town, which, like the ever-present snowfall, remains stubbornly serene when talk of a serial killer spreads.

It’s the early eighties. In due spirit a Rubik’s Cube becomes the catalyst of a new friendship between pallid, scrawny schoolboy Oskar and the mysterious girl next door Eli, whose droopy eyes and quiet manners belie a sinister secret.

Eli has been 12 for a very long time.

And in all her veteran experience as a preteen she encourages Oskar to stand up against the school bullies whose daily abuse has become a banal ritual for him. If at times he copes with his new regime, at others he still needs a little help…

It's hard not to mention Twilight when it comes to this film. I loved the Twilight books (I've yet to see the film), but while both stories share a skewed kind of romance between a human and a vampire, that's really where the similarities end.

Let The Right One In is something else entirely; a story of who we allow inside our defences when the options are limted, and what we'd do for them to keep them there. It's a coming of age love story between two children who haven't been allowed to be children for some time.

The direction and cinematography is nothing short of sublime. It has the pacing and stillness you'd expect of a Scandinavian film, but it's also punctuated with some of the most shocking and visually arresting scenes that I've seen in a horror movie for some time. Some of the cliches of vampire myths are magnificently re-intepreted; the title plays on the vampire trope of having to be invited over the threshold (the price of doing so without invitation is both startling and poignant); sunlight is as deadly as it ever was, and again plays into another stunning visual; and feeding is a feral, brutal act, all the more shocking when it crashes into the spectral wintry stillness. There are numerous subtexts too, that bubble under the surface. Some I suppose were cut in the transition from word to screen, but hint at some extremely dark subject matter and are all the more disturbing for their ambiguity in the film.

Of course a movie that centres around two twelve year old children could all too easily stumble if the young actor's performances fell short, but Lina Leandersson and Kare Hedebrant are simply luminous. Both portray achingly sad children, forced to rely upon each other when all else in life fails them, emitting a chilling and utterly convincing innocence.

Let The Right One In is nothing short of stunning. In my opinion it's the best interpretation of the vampire story that I've ever seen. You should all see this. I guarantee you'll fall in love with it....