The Greatest Trick

The first thing to note about Let the Right One In is that it is the finest horror film this decade. By horror film, I don’t mean it is akin to mindlessly gruesome, offensive and frankly unscary movies like Saw or Hostel. True horror films are frightening because they create believable and/or likeable characters caught up in terrifying situations that ruthlessly, sadistically and cathartically examine our deepest fears, not because blood and gore is frightening in itself. Let the Right One In doesn’t skimp on gore, but it employs such images sparsely and selectively, complimenting rather than dominating the story.

At its heart, this is really an ultra dark fairy tale about the dangers of isolation and loneliness. Twelve year old Oskar (Kare Hedebrant) is desperate to be loved by his separated parents but neither has the time for him. He spends his time staring out across the snow-covered tenement buildings where he lives indulging in revenge fantasies against school bullies. However, his life changes forever when he meets twelve year old Eli (Lina Leandersson), a girl who moves in next door that turns out to be a vampire. Oskar falls in love with her. In the meantime, the man Eli calls father, Hakan (Per Ragnar), goes out to kill for her, but a combination of exhaustion, ineptitude and bad conscience at years of murder causes him to be end up hospitalised, which forces Eli to fend for herself. At this point, a group of malcontent middle aged people from the tenement buildings are drawn into the plot when one of them, Jocke (Mikhael Rahm), is killed by Eli. Jocke’s best friend Lacke (Ika Nord) then becomes determined to track her down.

Recently, the vampire movie has become moribund, degenerating into mindless action (the Blade films), spoof (Lesbian Vampire Killers), and worst of all, bland teenage romance (Twilight, or as I prefer to call it Twiglet, with its ridiculous “vegetarian” vampires). However, this film injects some much needed fresh blood into the genre in a number of ways.

First, the story takes place in the early 80s amid miserable high-rise tenement buildings that feel like the Swedish equivalent of a Mike Leigh or Ken Loach setting. Mixing mythology with realism proved hugely successful in Pan’s Labyrinth (fairy tale with war) and here the results are similar. The characters in the film, whether vampire or human, go about leading quietly desperate, depressing lives, in fear of Soviet incursions into Swedish waters (as overheard on the television). One is occasionally reminded not only of previous “serious” vampire films like Nosferatu and Martin but also Ingmar Bergman’s work, especially The Silence.

Second, Let the Right One In eschews much of the silliness that has sprung up around vampire mythology. There are no stakes or garlic, nor even a church to hide in, but instead the film is built around the idea not only of what happens when you knowingly invite a vampire into your house, but the consequences of what happens if you don’t and they choose to come in anyway. Yet in spite of this and the immortality issue (which is amusingly alluded to when Eli shows Oskar a priceless Faberge egg), the vampires are stripped of much of their supernatural baggage and instead are presented as amoral creatures. Like any other predator they simply need to feed.

Third, John Ajvide Lindqvist’s screenplay (adapting his own novel), and Tomas Alfredson’s brilliant direction avoids cheap, obvious tricks. There are no jump-out-of- the-skin shocks, no he’s-behind-you moments and no flashy whiplash MTV type editing to try and generate false tension. Instead, the film is a slow burn of escalating dread, with nightmarish menace oozing from every shot, even simple ones like exteriors of buildings in the darkness. Like The Wicker Man, it is also highly disturbing in retrospect. The more one thinks about it afterwards, the more horrifying one realises it is. The ending in particular, which can be read a number of ways, is bleak however it is interpreted for reasons that aren’t initially obvious. In fact, it is probably destined to be the most widely debated ending since Blade Runner. Even Lindqvist and Alfredson differ as to how it should be interpreted (the novel ends more unambiguously, but that ending is still one of the possible readings of the film). On top of this there is an already controversial blink-and-you-miss-it shot akin to the unicorn dream sequence in Blade Runner that casts the character of Eli in a whole new light, and opens up unsettling questions about her past.

Such ambiguity will no doubt be absent from the inevitable, recently announced Hollywood remake for those who can’t be bothered to read subtitles. However, in the meantime, this macabre yet beautiful, slow but gripping instant masterpiece is a must-see for anyone with a serious love of cinema. The brilliant performances, direction and screenplay are complimented by excellence on every technical level; including cinematography, editing, music and sound (always critical in a horror film).

Spiritually, the nihilistic worldview is obviously something Christians will be at odds with, since God is entirely absent from proceedings. Additionally, it is undeniably disturbing (yet also genius on the part of the filmmakers) the way the audience is manipulated into being sympathetic to Oskar and Eli even when they are involved in murder. Logically, viewer sympathy ought to be with Lacke on account of everything he has suffered, but therein perhaps lies a deeper, albeit not immediately obvious message that can be learnt from the ultimate fates of both Lacke and (if you think about it) Oskar: isolation feeds the desire for revenge, and revenge is a really, really bad idea.

Simon Dillon, April 2009.