For a movie I’d never heard of before Fantastic Fest started, Let the Right One In could not have been more overhyped by the time I got to see it. Badgeholders were giving excited testimonials in the Alamo Drafthouse lobby, bloggers were threatening to beat people about the head with broken beer bottles unless they attended the screening, and even the Fantastic Fest representative who introduced the film gushed at embarrassing length about the mind-blowing wondrousness of the movie we were about to see. It’s nice to see the geek crowd expend so much enthusiasm on a low-budget film with subtitles rather than a $200 million superhero epic, but raising expectations to an unrealistic level doesn’t do the movie any favors. At the risk of sounding like the voice of reason, Let the Right One In is a good movie, but a modest one, not the next evolutionary leap forward in cinema.
So what is it? Basically, this Swedish import plays like a Dogme-style coming-of-age movie punctuated by surprising bursts of vampiric activity. Oskar (Kare Hedebrant) is the picked-on kid at school, a quiet, shy, towheaded boy who plays out silent revenge fantasies against his tormenters by stabbing trees in the yard of his apartment complex. He’s doing just that one evening when Eli (Lina Leandersson) appears behind him, seemingly from out of nowhere. She’s the new girl in the complex – she’s pale, a little raggedy, and as Oskar is kind enough to point out, she doesn’t smell so good. He doesn’t know it yet, but that’s because she’s dead, or rather undead (or as she prefers to phrase it, “I live on human blood”).
Tentative steps toward a friendship are taken – Oskar is particularly impressed when Eli manages to solve his Rubik’s Cube – and before long, the two are inseparable. Eli knows, however, that her terrible secret will rip them apart sooner than later. After Oskar strikes back at one of his tormenters during a school outing, the bullies plot their revenge, blissfully unaware that they are picking on the wrong vampire’s friend.
Let the Right One In is a slowly unfolding, intimate drama, except for the scenes where people burst into flames or have their jugulars ripped out of their necks. It works because director Tomas Alfredson has a real gift for staging the carnage in fresh, unexpected ways that don’t rely on elaborate special effects, and because he takes such care at developing the relationship between Oskar and Eli. There are some pacing issues and a couple of dreary patches, but Let the Right One In is worth a look when it’s released on DVD next month. (Please, don’t wait for the inevitable – and just-announced – American remake, to be directed by Cloverfield’s Matt Reeves.)
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