Film Review: Let the Right One In

Published on Friday 3 April 2009 16:34

LET THE RIGHT ONE IN (15) Director: Tomas Alfredson Running time: 115 minutes

LIKE policeman or presenters of history programmes, vampires are supposed to be very, very old, but these days, they seem to be getting younger and younger. Late last year there was the teenybop hit Twilight, where the bloodsucking semi-corpse hero competed with the likes of Zac Efron and Hannah Montana for pin-up space. Last month, we had the St Trinian-styled adolescents of Lesbian Vampire Killers, a film that begged for a hammer and a stake through the director's heart. But this shouldn't put you off seeing Let The Right One In: a brilliantly unsettling film that gives the desiccated vampire genre a much-needed transfusion. Swedish director Tomas Alfredson has made a creepy creature feature that warms the heart, chills the blood and could haunt you for days.

Set in the pre-mobile phone Eighties, 12-year-old Oskark (Kre Hedebrant) is a misfit living with his divorced, distracted mother and apart from his alcoholic dad. In the stark cycle of sensitive children everywhere, he's bullied horribly at school and is friendless at the drab complex of flats where he lives – until he meets his new neighbour, Eli (Lina Leandersson). Although she seems to be the same age as Oskar, she is everything he is not; as dark as Oskar is translucently blond, able to solve a Rubik's cube in a few twists, and nonchalant about padding around in snow without shoes. She immediately informs Oskar that they can't be friends, and the reason for her aloofness is obvious to us and then, gradually, to Oskar: she is a vampire. But to a boy as desperate as Oskar, that's not exactly a deal-breaker. Both pre-teens yearn for companionship and conclude that tentative, doomed love is better than no love at all.

Let The Right One In is both a throwback and step forward for vampire-kind. The undead in this film respect the most venerable traditions of the genre so that Eli avoids the sun, cannot enter a home unless invited, and can't eat ordinary food. Her eternal hunger can be heard on the soundtrack, with a stomach rumble as substantial and insistent as an underground train. Yet Eli is also a novel twist; Let The Right One In rejects the sexy image of rock star, leather-clad vampires, and there isn't a single close-up of bloody fangs. And while films like Twilight make it easy to root for the good vampires who can choose to live off non-human blood, Let The Right One In doesn't let the audience off so easily. Eli needs human blood and her victims are ordinary innocent people. One woman is bitten but not killed and, rather than become a reflection-free target for maddened cats, chooses an incendiary death. Yet it isn't until near the end of the film that you realise how much you are rooting for a vampire's survival.

Steeped in otherworldly stillness and unsettling moral ambiguity, Let The Right One In has a rather pleasing refusal to dot every i and cross every stake. When Oskar asks Eli to be his girlfriend, she tells him that she's "not a girl", and later there's a quick, macabre shot of a stitched-up groin. This could connect her vampirism to menstruation or confirm a change to androgyny, but Alfredson doesn't feel the need to elaborate any further. Nor does the film explain Eli's relationship with the much older man who lives with her and dutifully supplies her nutritional needs with a hunting knife and some plastic jerrycans. He may be her father, her husband or just the latest in a long line of companions devoted to Eli. He may even have signed on to help Eli in the same manner as Oskar.

Oskar may never be free from Eli and the film lets you decide if that's a blessing or a curse. Smart, resonant and beautifully realised, this is one of the essential horror films of the decade, an elegant, laconic story of the relationship between immortal and morsel. Apparently Hollywood is planning to make its own version of this film. Why bother? The right one is already in.

On release from Friday