Let the Right One In is a sort of quiet, meditative film with complex characters and a deceptively simple story. It's unique in the genre in and of itself, but when you're looking at a pair of children as the central foci, it's even more unique. And it's deeply character-focused and character-driven. It's profoundly suffused with a sadness that's usually reserved for much more serious films about things like orphans and poverty.
And yet it's presented in this envelope of a supernatural horror film. I think one gets the impression when these young protagonists are getting to know one another that this is really how children interact when nobody's watching or listening. And I can also never resist a story that's set in the ‘80s. In this, we have Oskar, who's kind of a spooky kid, a strange child, and of course when we meet him, he's acting out a murder. He's telling someone, an invisible someone, to squeal like a pig. And when we see him at school, he seems to consume a lot of non-age-appropriate material. A lot of it is about serial killers, or a serial killer. And he collects it all in a scrapbook, which is not unusual at all.
But it opens like you're about to watch a Christmas movie, a holiday film. It's very quiet and the snow is falling. Soon we're hearing things about halothane gas and watching unfortunate Swedes being strung up and bled like pigs. And yet it's almost like a situational comedic effect. Like the lives of vampires and their caregivers are kind of susceptible to the same silly foibles and accidents that the rest of ours are. But it's looking at these very complex relationships and asking questions like: Can we ever really know somebody after decades, or maybe after centuries? Oskar's mother doesn't seem to ever truly know Oskar. And Hakan, the caregiver, can never truly know anyone other than Eli. But even in that relationship, how much does he know her? It seems to tell us that closeness is dangerous and that it changes things.
When we see Oscar outside of the context of his apartment block or outside of school, when we see him with his father, that’s when he's truly happiest —when he exists slightly separately from everybody or hovers on the periphery. And that is what will ultimately become of that character as the film goes on.
I think that it's really beautifully acted and gorgeously photographed. There's a maturity to the kids' performances — and not just the central kids. It’s nearly across the board, which is never easy to achieve.
On the whole, it's a really strange, lovely, charming, surprising film. It treats its subject matter in a manner almost wholly unique to other vampire movies. It employs just enough convention to be a vampire film, but the audience is constantly surprised by the effect that it wrenches out of those conventions.
I'm really intrigued by the transformative powers of blood and violence that we see in the film. And on the subiect of convention, or conventionality, it manipulates ideas of gender and sex and sexuality. Eli often says, “I am not a girl,” in a voice that's dubbed by another actor to create a greater sense of androgyny to the character. But she never really tells us what she is, which makes the story more expansive and universal.
As is so often the case with the best horror films, you leave the story with the feeling that it's cyclical, that it sort of continues and it will continue after the last frame.
To hear our episode on Let the Right One In, click here.
Bradford Louryk