* This review is for the ORIGINAL version and not the ‘Merican version.
Tomas Alfredson’s film has been marketed over here as a pretty standard horror film, but I wouldn’t classify it as horror. There are horrific elements of course, but the film is more than that. It is a coming-of-age film and a love story. It is also a film about loneliness, resilience, and the pain of being a kid.
Oskar (Kare Hedebrant) is an outsider, bullied and ostracized by his classmates and misunderstood by his family but Eli (Lina Leandersson) connects with him in the same way that, we are led to presume, Eli connected with Hakan (Per Ragnar) before him. What Eli connects with isn’t Oskar’s vulnerability or loneliness, despite this being their common ground, it is his latent rage… the first words Eli hears from him are “Squeal! “Squeal like a pig!”, and his total detachment from the conventional standards and expectations of the people around him. This is the most interesting aspect of their friendship… Eli is the vampire with a capacity for violence which is tempered by a disregard for it. While Oskar’s capacity for violence is latent and expressed only through his fascination with newspaper reports of murders and his knife. There in lies the overall theme of the film… finding beauty in unexpected places.
The “Beauty” theme flows throughout the visuals of the film itself. The icicles on the windows, dripping blood in the snow, a hand-print fading on a windowpane, a perverse wonder is created by cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema. The beauty continues into the haunting echos of the soundtrack by Johan Söderqvist, which I recently bought. “Let the Right One In” is one of the most shockingly beautiful Vampire films I have since in ages. Twilight is simply cheap Sparkle-Motion vampire fluff compared to this. There is currently an American version to be released, and from what I have read it is already strategically modified. You gotta love the Hollywood “Remake” engine.
