Let the Right One In

Image: Momentum Pictures

The producers call it

a story about emancipation. Of how love and trust build the foundation for personal growth and liberation.

The film is based on a novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist, who wrote the screenplay. On the film's website he says:

Above all it's a love story. Of how Eli's love releases Oskar, how she makes him look upon himself in a different light. Not as the scared one, not as the victim. How she gives him courage to stand up for himself. But Eli is a vampire. A real one...

I still don’t really know what to make of it. It is an unforgettable film, poetic and complex, and for the most part never looks like a horror movie at all. For me, the worst horror is not what appears onscreen. It's been praised for its restraint but in fact I could have done with even less gore, and less sniggering at the back.

Horror is a genre I have never understood. Why do people laugh at horror films? How did horror become camp? And why do they laugh even when the horror isn’t camp? Why do they laugh at the most gruesome things? They can laugh because it’s unconvincing, or excessive. Perhaps they laugh when it’s too frightening, or out of relief, or simply to show their companions that they're not scared. Sometimes of course there is deliberate wit, a compact between director and knowing audience, and there was an element of that here.

As a student I went with a friend to see The Exorcist, which at the time was getting rave reviews in the grown up press. Despite the sniggering at the back, I was impressed by the night-dressed child’s passive-aggressive urination on the carpet at the cocktail party, rather shocked by the creative abuse of a crucifix, repulsed by the 360 degree head rotation (this was a generation before CGI) - but I’m afraid that by the time we got to the projectile vomiting I laughed too. It was just over the top. It didn’t make us popular with the Very Old townspeople in the audience. I had a feeling that I'd spoiled something, that they wanted to continue to be convinced by something that had now lost its spell over me. And in turn I had the feeling of having been spoilsported at times while watching this film. I wonder what the effect would have been if I'd seen it at home on DVD.

I still don’t really get horror. Violence revolts me, and I have so far resisted all blandishments to see Tarantino as I lack the sense of humour that finds severed limbs funny. (No, sorry, not even in that German fork-lift truck safety film.)

But I was persuaded to see this by the five-star reviews, one of those rare occasions when Anthony Quinn (The Independent) agrees with Nigel Andrews (the FT). They insisted this was more than a vampire movie.

It could hardly be more different from the image conjured up by the tag "teenage vampire movie". There's no sex, no glamour, very little melodrama. It’s set in a bland suburb of Stockholm in the early 1980s, tensions with Russia on the radio in the background. It is winter, bitter outside and fetid indoors. The camera is patient, allowing appreciation of composition, the almost abstract qualities of the blocks of flats. The pace is restrained, and there is a rich palette of sound. The focus is on Oskar, a twelve year old boy who is being bullied at school and fantasises about revenge.

There is a murder scene very early on, where a young man is waylaid at night in the park. There is some verismo business with scuffed plastic containers and the sound of blood knocking into them. It's all very matter of fact. But the butchery is interrupted by a dog. There is undeniably something uncomfortably funny about the way the dog is so riveted by the scene – as anyone might be – and continues to ignore its owner’s calls. Instead it sits down to watch. It’s funny not least because it’s one of those fancy manicured poodles, sitting politely, not a wild-looking mutt who'd have been getting stuck in. The streetlights are on in the background, and passing traffic. The murderer gets more and more frantic, and it’s funny too because such an effete looking creature can thwart someone so murderous. And because it’s a movie, part of you wants the man to get away with it so we can have more of the story. The scene epitomises the delicate area the film explores: the park, liminal between civilisation and the elemental, banality and evil. The horror is that it can happen within earshot of everything ordinary.

For the first twenty minutes or so, I was in the world of the movie: the housing estate, the cold, the mundanities of the kid’s life, the bullying he suffers, his halting attempts at friendship with the mysterious girl. This is what the film does best: ordinariness, alienation, suggestion. It's never exactly clear how much is going on in real life and how much in Oskar's head. The leads – Kåre Hedebrant as Oskar and Lina Leandersson as Eli – are terrific. Natural, sensitive, believable. The film is psychologically very astute. It lingers but never bores. The tension is fantastic.

The film makes beautiful pictures, whether of the suburbs, the snow, or the outback, where the boy’s father drinks vodka with a man who appears out of nowhere and may be his lover. Or maybe just a drinking buddy, and the lover is really the vodka, but at any rate the boy knows his idyll with his father is ruined.

Then a man's face is half destroyed by acid, and the students giggle. They are so grown up, students these days, and so knowledgeable.

Some of the special effects seemed unnecessary. But perhaps their ability to disrupt underlines the moral ambiguity. Eli herself is not above a bit of passive-aggressive manipulation in her bid to be accepted across the threshold.

And there are puzzles, some of which might be resolved by the book, which I haven't read. This is a film: it doesn't need a book to explain it. There are hints of a massive back story for Eli. Why, if she is so “old”, is her Pa so incompetent at bloodletting? He wears a homely plastic overcoat, has an idea of disposing of a body, but really is extraordinarily hamfisted, not reading the culture: he chooses a park with streetlights; he doesn’t realise that kids will wait for their pals to go home together after basketball practice. He is new to the city, but acts as if he is new to the century – which is the last one, not ours.

And why has Eli got that scar we glimpse for a moment? What does it mean? (Oskar is wounded twice: once by violence, and once by his own bravado.) And the jigsaw egg, which she claims is worth enough to buy a nuclear power plant, an odd measure of value?

There is a shockingly ambiguous scene in which the father goes back home to the vampire daughter and asks her to do one thing for him, not to see “that boy”. Although the narrative is skewed to suggest that he is always her gofer, here is a glimpse of an alternative abusive relationship. He is clearly jealous. She touches his cheek as if to confer a blessing; he closes his eyes as if receiving it. In his submission, we glimpse a sense of his desire.

It seems commonly agreed that in this movie vampirism is a metaphor for other sorts of difference. Both Oskar and Eli are outsiders. Neither has a normal family life. Oskar lives with a mother who seems to pay him no attention, let alone notice that he's being bullied, and a father who indulges him with a sentimental fondness until the bottle appears. Eli’s parent/guardian makes it his business to go about getting her haemoglobin rations, and doesn’t appear to have any job.

None of the adults in the film is particularly sympathetic.* The parents don’t seem to engage properly with the boy; the others are boozers, except for the teacher who can’t wait to get home when the bell rings - even though Oskar is staying behind, copying something out of an encyclopaedia. You’d think she’d want to see what he’s up to, but she leaves him to it, and he rather touchingly switches off the classroom light when he leaves. In one scene where his mother berates him, the sound wonderfully enacts how Oskar switches off.

Eli’s true nature eventually dawns on Oskar: she appears only after dark, doesn’t seem to feel the cold, and when Oskar cuts his hand in a gesture of kinship, falls to the floor to lap it up with those curious animal gutturals that come with her affliction. He accepts this, yet when later she offers him money he is scandalised. You stole it! You stole it from those people you killed!

What is going on here? He nods at murder but baulks at theft? Is vampirism so bizarre that both Oskar and we the audience can gloss over it as beyond morality, a theatrical device, a mere stroke of fate that has to be endured despite its victims (for the most part not the toothsome youngsters of tradition, but boozers and losers – the implication perhaps that none of them will be missed)? Perhaps I’m being too literalist, but it’s one thing to accept someone from an alien culture, or with an alienating label or even an antisocial addiction, but quite another to be OK around a vampire.

Critics have focused on how it is a beautiful metaphor, probably because the darker side is bleedin' obvious. And there is a deeply disturbing cultural aspect to it. Eli’s way of life is shown as different but sufficiently similar that she can live in the flat next door. She may sleep in the bath under a light-proof cover, but when the cover is lifted, she is an ordinary girl asleep. In one sense, Eli provides the kinship that Oskar, if he weren't a loner, would find in a gang. At that level, the violence isn't so remarkable. Although friendship and acceptance can redeem us, if we befriend the wrong person, one possible outcome of unconditional acceptance is corruption.


*Correction: one of the unglamorous middle aged boozers is a heroine. She makes the supreme sacrifice in one of those scenes with baffling comedic overtones, but she has been dogged (or should that be catted) by comedy all along.