While it was billed as a Swedish horror film, comes with the requisite blood and gore, and was released suspiciously close to Halloween, Let the Right One In is not a typical preteen vampire movie, per se — it’s simply a movie about preteens. Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema gives us a broken, Cold War suburb of Stockholm composed entirely of silence and snow, a place not so much hopeless as utterly still, a perfect summoning of Wallace Stevens’ “nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”
Which is to say that everyone in the movie looks really cold. Most of all Oskar, the bullied boy with translucent skin who falls for the new girl in town. The script, adapted from the novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist, rarely deviates from the genre’s familiar cast: the clueless mom; the unreliable father; the adult who won’t let young lovers be together; the awkward, fumbling courtship. But in this case the courtship takes place amid corpses, the villain is a broke-down alcoholic avenging the embalming of his only friend, and the girl is a vampire.
You’d think this would make for camp, but it doesn’t. Let The Right One In avoids winking at its audience at all costs. If it’s about anything, it’s about the lonely madness of being a kid. It brings us back to the age when you wouldn’t care about a few murders if it meant you could kiss a girl who really, really understood you. We see the violence through the eyes of someone who is unready for ethical thought. When the blood-smeared kids jump off the playground and into the night, we want them to get away. When Oskar comforts his lady, who can’t keep down any candy, we smile; the other parts of her diet don’t even register.
But the real-world backdrop is there too. You get a consistent sense of the frailty of the town. These are poor people in a desperate, desolate place, the last sort we want to see bled dry and thrown in a lake. It is this expert dialing of our sympathy that makes Let The Right One In such an effective film. Director Thomas Alfredson gives us a haunting double-portrait: the ruthless pre-teen heart, and the ruthlessness in life that makes us want it back.
