film, eyeballs, brain

It isn’t often that you hear the words “tender” about a horror film and not have it refer to the consistency of human flesh, but the Swedish film Let The Right One In (Låt den rätte komma in), directed by Tomas Alfredson, is just that: a surprisingly tender and simultaneously horrific vampire movie. This strange and beautiful film is set in the bleak midwinter of Stockholm in the early ’80s, in a drab apartment block that’s probably the Swedish equivalent of public housing.

Our protagonist, Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant), is a rather helpless twelve-year old boy. So far, his role in life seems to be that of a punching bag; he’s routinely called “piggy” – and later, much worse things are done to him – by a group of young tormentors in his class. His outward reaction is almost always nothing more than a resigned, numbed acceptance.

But in his head, it’s different; Oskar has fantasies of killing them. When we first meet the shy, withdrawn Oskar — blond mop of hair, snot characteristically leaving a trail down his upper lip — he’s playing with a knife and ordering an imaginary attacker to “squeal like a pig”. (It’s not necessarily a quote from Deliverance, but one can imagine he heard this from his classmates.) He collects newspaper clippings about murders in a scrapbook; it’s creepy, but understandable somehow, the sad result of a ruined childhood.

He is, perhaps, not as creepy as his neighbors – a father and a young girl named Eli (played by the excellent Lina Leandersson) – who move in next door and has covered up all the windows with pieces of cardboard. Eli isn’t just any little twelve-year old girl. She smells funny, she doesn’t go out at night, and she seems to be unaffected by the cold; she also drinks blood from people she has bitten on the neck. “I’ve been twelve for a long time,” Eli tells Oskar later. (We quickly learn as well that the father, named Håkan, isn’t exactly her father; he’s her Renfield. We see Håkan at the beginning, packing unlikely equipment – a knife, sleeping gas, a face mask, rope, a funnel, and a plastic gallon container – into a large briefcase, all tools for procuring victims and their blood.)

“Just so you know, I can’t be your friend,” Eli warns Oskar when they meet for the first time. But they nonetheless form a bond, not improbably, in the natural way that children do. (In fact, their first meetings are on a jungle gym in the apartment courtyard.) But this turns – again, not improbably – into an unexpectedly touching, though not exactly innocent, puppy love between the two. (The two (non-professional) child actors Hedebrant and Leandersson bring a convincing vulnerability to their roles. Indeed, they’re almost adorable, but not in a conventional Hollywood sense.)

What the movie accomplishes best is the surprising depth of emotional resonance. Early in the film, Oskar buys her candy, not knowing that her only diet is blood; she eats it anyway, perhaps out of gratitude at the unexpected gift, and ends up vomiting in the process. (Despite its bleak surroundings, the film is not without its own brand of dry humor: a scene where a pesky poodle interrupts a homicide, or showing Håkan incongruously chugging a glass of milk at a bar.) But the scene also foreshadows a later sequence when Eli voluntarily shows him the bloody consequence of violating certain vampire rules. Alfredson negotiates a skillful balance here of the sweet and the sinister.

Let The Right One In is elegantly shot by cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema with a muted, somber palette. The camera gives us oblique close ups of the backs of people’s heads, of snow on branches, and it is characteristic of the movie’s relative stillness – a rarity in today’s horror films. The same care is given to depicting the sadness of the supporting characters, with Anderson’s observant eye for social class. Oskar and his mother are surrounded by the marginally employed residents of the apartment building, who spend their days drinking with each other.

The title of the movie refers to – as many students of vampire lore would know –the way in which vampires can only enter a room if they are invited. But it’s also about Eli inviting Oskar into her similarly solitary life – whether it’s based on affection, or a cold utilitarianism, it’s nicely left unclear. But Let The Right One In is a horror movie, first and foremost, and those who watch it (after my description above) hoping for something resembling a quirky romance will be unnerved by its homicides. Even with its relatively restrained gore, the film, after all, is about a vampire who needs to feed on human blood. That it all seems sweetly romantic is part of this excellent film’s seductive quality as well.

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1. Johnnie To, "Sparrow" (2008).
2. Kiyoshi Kurosawa, "Tokyo Sonata" (2008).
3. Kathryn Bigelow, “The Hurt Locker” (2008).