It’s funny how vampires go in and out of fashion in movies. It strikes me for some reason that we’re suddenly beset by vampire movies after going a few years without, but I could just be caught up in the hype and advertising for Twilight. I haven’t seen Twilight, by the way, and I have no particular desire to. Teen romance novels, not really my thing. And turning teen romance novels into movies is not the kind of behaviour I want to encourage with my movie dollars.
I also don’t especially like horror movies. I don’t mind suspense in the sense that I like a story that makes me want to know what happens next, but I don’t like being scared. Monsters jumping around corners just don’t do much for me. The last vampire movies I saw that I liked was Shadow of the Vampire, a take on how a vampire might interact with the world in a different sort of way than in the traditional vampire setting, without the castle and the turning into a bat and the stakes and stuff.
That’s why we went to see Let The Right One In (or Låt den rätte komma in in the original Swedish): it sounded like a different sort of take on vampires. The description we read at NOW magazine that made us decide to go used the sentence “things go helter-skelter when Oskar discovers that his puppy-love interest is a member of the undead.” What’s not to like about that statement?
That’s really the strength of Let The Right One In, and presumably why it’s gotten such critical acclaim: it’s different. The vampire is a young girl, for one thing. The protagonist is a 12-year-old boy who falls in love with her. Not exactly Dr. Van Helsing chasing Bela Lugosi’s Dracula around in 1931, and all the variations that have come since, is it?
Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant) is a typical young loner, picked on at school by his classmates, living with his divorced mom, spending weekends with his dad, passing time alone in the courtyard of his apartment building. A creepy little girl named Eli (Lina Leandersson) moves in next door and they hit it off. She teaches him that he needs to fight back against his bullies, he shows her that little blonde Swedish boys can love and be loved, that kinda thing. Of course, it all starts to go wrong when Eli’s inhuman thirst for blood takes hold, and members of the community start turning up dead. But even as Oskar realizes what Eli really is, his love for her stays just as strong. Awwww.
Scenes of the two of them holding hands, doing a Rubik’s cube, and lying in bed as Oskar shyly asks Eli if she’d like to “go steady” are interspersed with tense scenes of Eli tricking people into coming too close in the dark before she bites their necks and kills them, her guardian tying up and stabbing people in an attempt to funnel their blood into large jugs to feed Eli’s thirst, and the town trying to figure out why and how their friends are being killed.
If parts of this all sound very familiar, well, that’s deliberate. Let The Right One In relies on a lot of tried and true movie formulas and stereotypes when depicting people, relationships, and vampires, much moreso than it relies on developing such things within the movie. You really have to know a lot of the old fictions about vampires going into this movie, or several things aren’t going to make a lot of sense to you. It actually took a couple of tries before I remembered that vampires can’t come into a home unless you invite them in, for instance, which is actually a central theme that helps give the movie it’s title. Oskar’s mom is easily recognizable as the overbearing but well-meaning parent, his dad the cool guy who can’t put his kid first, his gym teacher the stern but gentle authority figure, his bully the macho yet cowardly kid, his bully’s cronies the weak-willed sheep, etc., etc. These are all secondary characters so maybe that can be forgiven, but thinking back on it, even Oskar seems more like your typical lonely, alienated pre-teen than any kind of distinct character.
Maybe that’s by design, and maybe the impression was supposed to be that any young loner could end up falling for the vampire next door; maybe for a movie where a moviegoer has to know what a “typical” vampire’s abilities and weaknesses are going in, relying on their preconceived notions of typical characters too is ok. But instead of really developing any characters outside of Eli or any relationships besides Eli and Oskar’s, Let The Right One In fills the rest of it’s 114 minute run time with shots of snow, silence, and slow, frequently awkward dialogue. The awkward dialogue is usually ok; that’s how most kids talk at age 12. Honestly, though, I could’ve done with about half the number of establishing shots of bleak courtyards of snow that went on during the course of the movie.
This is not a movie for impatient people. It’s easy to like it for it’s novel take on vampire relations, but sometimes frustrating in its simplistic characters and occasionally glacial pacing.
3/5. I liked it, but just not that much.
