A Review of Let The Right One In...
Tomas Alfredson has defied all expectations. He’s taken the most self reflective of genres and reinvented it with a single stunning film. Unquestionably subversive at times transcendent, Let The Right One In reintroduces the vampire character to the real world. Gone are the clichés and what replaces them is a story of uncertain friendship and fragile love in a social reality of the darkest fantasy.
Oskar is a 12 year old boy out of sync with this world, so pale he’s almost translucent, so physically unimposing he’s practically invisible, the ghost of the narrative. Unfortunately for Oskar escape is elusive; he’s tragically bullied at school, and consequently buries himself in a scrapbook of violent murders and trades in any friendship for a world of fantasy.
Enter Eli, immediately different in the tranquil Swedish setting, Eli has jet black matted hair and wears only a pink shirt to protect her from the cold. They meet in a shallow pool of light cast by streetlights, a sickly halo thrown over the old rusting playground. Outside the light is lurking the dark unknowable night, but inside Oskar finds a protector from the dark. All the while there are questions Eli cannot answer, a serial killer stalking the streets of his town and dangers beyond the darkness of the playground but Oskar has already stepped into the light.
The film is highly reminiscent of Miyazaki’s Castle in the Sky, and is all the more heartfelt a love story with its faltering under adolescent uncertainty. When Eli comes to Oskar’s room one night, after feeding, she climbs in behind him, and unable to see her face he asks her to be his girlfriend. She replies “will anything change?” he says No and so she agrees. And as they lie there listening to Eli’s heartbeat, the film reaches a moment of transcendence where innocence, horror and love dissolve into each other.
In its collision of fantasy and reality, love and loss, and darkness and light, Let The Right One In has swept aside the rest of the genre and proved that horror thrills definitely don’t come cheap.
