Let The Right One In

Directed by Tomas Alfredson

They don’t come much more stylish than this Swedish hybrid of vampire and adolescent sexual awakening genres. Cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema’s elegantly composed shots and Jessica Fridén’s retro-cool costume department create an aesthetic somewhere between a fashion spread and a music video. Director Tomas Alfredson, and production designer Eva Norén work in a kind of icy blue-gray palette throughout the film’s Scandinavian modernist locales in suburban Stockholm. The hard geometry and morgue-like tiling of the housing complex setting nonetheless harbors a rag-tag community of friends and gossipmongers that we come to know well. This set-up of community life arranged around a courtyard recalls Hitchcock’s Rear Window, particularly as suspicions multiply and home invasions increase.

But such adult concerns (murders and other meddling problems) serve mainly as backdrop in Let The Right One In’s child-centric narrative. Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant) is our vaguely girly leading lad, living with an emotionally absent mother, and whose (perhaps gay) father resides in the countryside. Oskar is relentlessly bullied at school, and his budding knife fetish suggests he’ll soon seek a violent solution to his social problems. Mysterious Eli (Lina Leandersson) moves in next door, and a relationship of mutual growth and support evolves.

To call the mix of child sexuality and tactfully deployed vampire action that ensues a genre hybrid is reductive though. The two narratives aren’t grafted onto each other for novelty’s sake. Rather, they carry each other into more interesting territory – not unlike the way Oskar and Eli push each other into greater confidence and maturity. Vampirism as a metaphor for sexuality is nothing new – with Interview With A Vampire and Buffy as only the most recent iterations of a trend already firmly established by the time Bram Stoker’s Dracula was released in 1897. But that tradition is wonderfully adapted here as a vessel for exploring the too often taboo subject of children’s sexual awakening.

Not that Let The Right One In is all psychosexual allegory, but that dimension is very present. The portrayal of the housing complex’s depressed adults is also well-rendered, and provides a kind of crystal ball onto the future that makes Oskar and Eli’s evolution into even-keeled individuals all the more important. How depressing it would be if these conflicted but endearing kids ended up like the adults they’re growing up around. Let The Right One In places firm hope in its young duo, and does so with a mix of visual and narrative flair that’s original and entertaining.

This review appeared on The L Magazine's blog as part of that magazine's coverage of the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival, and can also be read here.