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Let the Right One In
Sunday, July 18th, 2010
Let the Right One In is eerie, engaging and morally ambiguous. The story’s premise is about an 11-year-old boy, Oskar, who meets a 12-year-old vampire, Eli, who has just moved into his apartment complex. On the surface it’s an inversion of vampire films, portraying the typical villains as innocent children and following their entanglement, while the victims are kept in the background, even as Eli slowly destroys their lives.
But it’s in this way that director Tomas Alfredson explores the darkness of coming of age, the crossing over from childhood to brutal adulthood. Out the outset of the film Oskar fantasies about using a knife to frighten, torture and kill the bullies who torment him at school. When Eli shows up, it’s almost as if the two have the rapport of sociopaths, and they find camaraderie in the alienation and anger they both have bubbling beneath the surface. Even though she doesn’t express the blunt evil of most movie vampires, Eli suffers no qualms or doubts about having to kill to feed, which is ironic considering the almost innocent way she conducts her relationship with Eli. She barely even seems to be aware of the impact she has the lives of the loved ones of the victims, who grow to hate her even as she just considers them detritus in their need to feed.
The film works overall, mostly because of the sound design that leaves thing sparse and empty, as though great chasms exist between conversations and any noise could break the stability of the lives portrayed. There is one scene around the middle, though, involving CGI cats that hits a kind of false note and was just too goofy for me to take seriously. It was an attempt at something more action-oriented that just felt out of place with the slow, methodical nature of the film. It also reminded me more than a little bit of Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive.
It’s a tight, well made horror film that definitely has moments, and while not especially challenging does delight and thrill.