LET THE RIGHT ONE IN, Låt den rätte komma in, Tomas Alfredson, 2008
While this feature had many cute moments, mainly found in the innocent pathos between a young boy Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant) and his vampire protector the ageless and androgynous Eli (Lina Leandersson), it was a watchable but flawed endeavor.
Aesthetically the film didn’t click for me. The editing was inhibited - poorly timed cutting making the visual style of the film feel a little impotent. The potentially claustrophobic interiors were underplayed and the use of the snowy Swedish exteriors again felt dispossessed except as a double for the largely depressed cast.
The camera was a little grainy and the scenes largely realist in set up, which are fine in theory, except that a vampire-horror genre piece or a film with a child protagonist are generally given over to more fantastic visions. In trying to forge some point between the two, realism and the fantastic, nothing felt fully realized. Some of the most interesting scenes focused on the bodies of the child characters and the lengthened shot time in these sequences could have been extended to give a more contemplative tone to the entire film, or to give the entire scenario over to a sense of the uncanny.
What maintained the film was the story itself, adapted from the (apparently) exquisite book by John Adjvide Lindvquist (who also wrote the screenplay). It allowed the trajectory of the film to take a slow dive from bleak everyday life towards the colour of carnal horror without ever feeling like something other than a child’s film (which is quite an achievement in tone really). Alongside this redeeming consistency, the final scene is a rewarding watch. Including a swimming pool and a bully’s revenge it was joyously gratuitous – a dismembering worthy of both smiles and applause.
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