Imagine yourself as a child, maybe around 12 years old. The world is confusing, you do not have many friends and your schoolmates are upcoming sociopaths and bullies. On top of that, your mother and father are divorced. Therefore, you express your feelings of loneliness, anger and sadness by collecting newspaper clippings of murders and threatening an invisible antagonist with your knife. You aren't in a happy place and you don't know how to really cope until an attractive stranger, about your age, moves into your apartment complex at night and blocks out the windows with cardboard. You're interested in meeting them and a little scared too, but, like so many things in your life, you don't know why you should feel both ways.
This is the situation in Tomas Alfredson's 2008 Swedish film "Let the Right One In." The vampire flick, based off of a 2004 novel by Swedish Author John Ajvide Lindqvist, was shown on Oct. 26 at 7:30 pm in Wygal Auditorium. Dr.David Magill presented the movie as a film about "alienation and love" that differed from others of its genre due to the lack of sexuality. This is understandable due to the prepubescent nature of its main characters, a fact that makes no real good guy or bad guy in the mix of a banal setting with a terrifying premise.
The story takes place in the Swedish capital Stockholm where Oskar and his mom, Yvonne, live in an apartment complex with a crew of middle class, middle-aged and largely unimpressive characters. Then a man named Hankan and his little girl Eli rent a flat very close by and proof the apartment against any exposure to sunlight. Soon afterwards, a boy is found bled out and hanging from a tree, a man's body is discovered in a frozen lake and a woman spontaneously combusts in a psychiatric ward.
The film has the same charms as a horror film from ten years before in Japan or Korea with a bleak atmosphere and a sort of subtle touch to the most amazing and scary moments. Some catch you by surprise as when Eli bleeds a hapless and well-intentioned neighbor to death at the height of her hunger. Others are almost hilarious as when a concerned nurse misses the little girl, while she easily scales the side of a hospital building. However, we have to understand that Eli is a victim, not an abuser, of her blood feeding ways, and she needs protection and support from Hankan first and little Oskar second. Meanwhile, she needs to give Oskar the courage to fight his bullies at school and later protect the small boy from nearly being drowned by his bully's older brother. She and Oskar also have to grapple with the fact that they are attracted to one another and fumble with concepts belonging to people six years older than they are. Perhaps the funniest moment is when Oskar, laying in the bed with Eli, asks if she would like to go steady. She replies with another question: "Do people do anything different when they go steady?" Oskar predictably has little to say.
Along with the realistic relationships shown in this movie, the visual forms a strong combination of symbolism and gut reaction. Eli, pale-skinned and dark-haired, has gigantic round eyes and sharp features characteristic of a Nosferatu. But she may be a different type of vampire than we know. Catlike and – in the case of the film's only other vampire – attacked by painfully CGI felines, this type of look mostly climbs, but doesn't fly, humping its back at the height of inhumanness to hold on to a neck. Likewise, Oskar is small, fair-haired and quiet. Just as we do not expect Eli to kill, we do not expect him to fight for himself.
Due to this strange complimentary nature, "Let the Right One In" is more a romance than anything else, a tale about finding who you need and accepting the gifts they give you. In the end, it is a quiet film with a quiet setting interrupted only some a life's hardships.
