Let The Right One In is one of the rare movies to become an instant favourite after I first saw it.
In September 2023, I finally got to see it on the big screen.
I was planning to produce this review shortly thereafter, but any thoughts or feelings from that screening evaporated shortly thereafter.
I had developed feelings for someone and a few days after the screening, I confessed my feelings. They did not feel the same way. Such is life.
Suddenly the ambiguous attachment between the central characters was infused with my own feelings of confusion and depression.
I cannot think of any similarities between the film and my experience (we are adults and neither of us is a vampire), but now I cannot think about this movie without chrono-locking to that moment.
The time away was probably a benefit to my appraisal of the film.
Going back to the film now, l am fascinated by how delicate the film’s balance of elements is.
When I first watched it back in the early 2010s, I thought of the film as naturalistic, as the most believable portrayal of vampirism I had ever seen.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Hoyte Van Hotyema’s chilly, muted colour palette and wide, isolating compositions are far from documentary.
Instead the film is an exercise in minimalism, focusing on the most specific and essential elements of its world to evoke the emotional states of its characters.
The film’s focus on ellipses and inference remains a delight: Oskar’s interest in violent crime; Eli’s motives; the nature of Eli’s relationship with her familiar Håkan (Per Ragnar).
This extends to the queer subtext running through the film, from Oskar’s father is living in the country with his boyfriend, to the rejection of a sexual/gender binary in the lead characters’ central bond.
One of the most enduring elements of the film is that Oskar and Eli have no anxieties about their relationship.
The film feels like a fairytale - a small story, about innocence, or lack thereof.
The two child performances remain electric: as Oskar, Kåre Hedebrant initially comes across as a familiar type: a naive, lonely boy with an active imagination.
While he is a shrinking wallflower, he is never positioned as a stereotypical ‘good’ kid. Instead, he is a loner who is interested in true crime and weapons. He is bullied at school, and fantasises about how he can fight back.
There is a pleasing lack of sentiment to the character, balanced with a childlike sense of optimism.
Eli - performed by Lina Leandersson and dubbed by Elif Ceylan - is a remarkable sphinx of a character: wistful, knowing of aspects of the world while innocent about others.
She is both the site of the film’s terrors and empathy.
Filled with iconic scenes - the extended shot in the pool; Håkan, cornered in the locker room, realising that he is done for - the film never feels like a formalist exercise. There is a quiet humanity to the film’s portrayal of its characters, a refusal to treat them as pure archetypes.
At points, it feels like you are in Oskar’s position - powerless and somewhat ignorant of the outside world. The camera is often positioned at a child’s eye level with a shallow depth of field.
The adult world is treated at a remove - their helplessness conveyed in wide, long shots.
I am vaguely interested in rewatching then American remake. I watched it around the same time as the original, but it did not leave much of an impression.
A beautiful film.
Related
Dracula (1931 Spanish version)
The Last Voyage of the Demeter
