by Craig Downing on January 29, 2009

What it is: Let The Right One In is not just a vampire movie. This mood-setting movie is about friendship, youth and relationships. And, yes, friendship, youth and relationships do get a little complicated when you are a 300 year old vampire in a 12 year old's body. Based on the best-selling Swedish book, Låt Den Rätte Komma In (Let Me In) by John Ajvide Lindqvist, this movie slowly infects you with a mood and tone that makes it nearly impossible to simply catalog the movie as a vampire movie. The film has been knocking audiences dead after winning many awards on the film fest circuit including Best Narrative Feature (Tribeca Film Festival). Overall, the film masterfully balances the dynamics of the darker side of vampires within a modern and realistic setting.

Why It is Significant: The movie is significant for its ability to hold you in a mood for the entire length of the movie. Let The Right One In exemplifies how a movie doesn’t have to be loud with rusty and bloody lawn mower blades to haunt your thoughts days after you leave the dark theater. In addition, there are minor plots within the story, each adding their own unbearable tension to the overall draw of the movie. Think you are beyond liking vampire movies? Me too. But, this movie had me wishing I could move to Sweden in order to befriend a strong vampire as my own personal wingman. And, hey, watch the movie now so when the American remake (directed by Matt Reeves) comes out in 2010 you can brag that you already saw the original Swedish version. -Craig

Amazon.com Review
The enduring popularity of the vampire myth rests, in part, on sexual magnetism. In Let the Right One In, Tomas Alfredson's carefully controlled, yet sympathetic take on John Ajvide Lindqvist's Swedish bestseller-turned-screenplay, the protagonists are pre-teens, unlike the fully-formed night crawlers of HBO’s True Blood or Catherine Hardwicke’s Twilight (both also based on popular novels). Instead, 12-year-old Oskar (future heartbreaker Kåre Hedebrant) and Eli (Lina Leandersson) enter into a deadly form of puppy love. The product of divorce, Oskar lives with his harried mother, while his new neighbor resides with a mystery man named Håkan (Per Ragnar), who takes care of her unique dietary needs. From the wintery moment in 1982 that the lonely, towheaded boy spots the strange, dark-haired girl skulking around their outer-Stockholm tenement, he senses a kindred spirit. They bond, innocently enough, over a Rubik's Cube, but little does Oskar realize that Eli has been 12 for a very long time. Meanwhile, at school, bullies torment the pale and morbid student mercilessly. Through his friendship with Eli, Oskar doesn't just learn how to defend himself, but to become a sort of predator himself, begging the question as to whether Eli really exists or whether she represents a manifestation of his pent-up anger and resentment. Naturally, the international success of Lindqvist's fifth feature, like Norway's chilling Insomnia before it, has inspired an American remake, which is sure to boast superior special effects, but can't possibly capture the delicate balance he strikes here between the tender and the terrible. --Kathleen C. Fennessy

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