Let The Right One In

Viewer Rating:Justin has rated Let The Right One In rating: 3 Star

The less you know about this film the better. It suffices to know that it's an unusual friendship drama between two children in a frozen corner of Scandanavia sometime in the 1980s -- the shy, troubled Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant) and off-kilter Eli (Lina Leandersson). (Some minor spoilers ahead…) Pale and delicate as the snow that falls through the opening frames of the film, Oskar is quiet, bullied at school and -- to our eyes -- seriously troubled. He keeps a knife under his bed and talks to a tree as Travis Bickle might address a mirror. The muffled white landscape lends the films a magic that almost mocks the grimy, dead-end lives of the characters. It feels as if the people of the town have given up; everything they could achieve or create will be covered by snow and ice, frozen over even before they die. Eli (frozen in her own way, too) must see humans as snowflakes: unique, delicate and something that dies in the palm of her hand. LET THE RIGHT ONE IN is beautifully filmed with marvellous production design and acting, but as there's nobody in the film with whom we can really identify, it remains a film more to be admired than liked. By the end of the film, though it may seem in the short term like a happy ending (at least for some of the characters!) there's a dread that comes from knowing that eventually Eli will shed every human being she meets like a snakeskin. The curse of the vampire is not that it drinks blood, but that it incrementally, mercilessly, consumes entire lifetimes.

Review published on the 16 May 2009 20:38