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Vampires are your friends
It is a snowy and dark winter in the outskirts of Stockholm in 1982. For 12-year-old Oskar (Kare Hedebrant), life does not provide much cheer; his parents are divorced, his mother is never home, he doesn’t have any friends and school has turned into a nightmare as three of his classmates have made a fulltime job out of violently bullying the cherubic boy. It is not so much that the grown-ups around are disappointing, since their absence (even if they are physically present) has become a given in Oskar’s life, but it is truly frightening how his own peers can be so cruel. Enter Eli (Lina Leandersson), the girl who moves in next door. Eli takes a fascination to Oskar despite her initial declaration that “she will not be his friend” when they officially meet each other in the depressing suburban courtyard.
The strange thing is, Eli only comes out when it is dark, she smells like a corpse when she’s hungry and her elder “guardian” brings her the blood of young men, of course after he kills them. Wouldn’t you know it; the girl is a vampire who has been 12 for, well, a very, very long time. But the key here is that Eli is in dire conflict with her blood yearning; she kills out of survival not out of desire.
Noticing the vengeful frustration in Oskar, she warns him with her dry wisdom that they are very different: if he had the chance, he would actually kill the bullies at school. There is something deeply compassionate in Eli despite her general moroseness, and it isn’t long before the two strike a friendship, in which the girl/vampire shows Oskar how to stand up for himself -- perhaps a little too much.
Tomas Alfredson’s restrained and minimalistic directing uses the vampire theme more as a means than an end itself; the violent acts throughout the film are always shown with distance and never up close, the meticulous sound design has a more frightening effect than the visuals itself, thus perhaps making the acts ever more intrinsically disturbing, if not gruesome.
The matte colors of cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema’s palette create an atmosphere of “Scandinavian” loneliness and isolation, rather than a playground for gushing red blood (most of the time the color of blood comes close to shades of black). Thus it is not the threat of a vampire that creates the horror in this film, but the permeated isolation and alienation of its characters, especially Eli, who does not find power in her predicament, but the sadness of being a freak of nature and of an eternity of remaining alive. And of course Oskar’s own seclusion among his own kind is the most wretched of all; for even though he can walk among the “living,” he finds no warmth or intimacy in his immediate surroundings.
In such a situation, it does not come as a surprise that the most comforting element is the relationship between these two lonely kids, one frozen in her body and the other frozen in his fear. As the story develops to show their blossoming friendship, no matter the dreary circumstances, the genuine acts of friendship and compassion that are carried out between the two provide a different kind of warmth and consolation, even though these acts will bring grim consequences.
The two child actors here are admirable in their subtle and haunting performances, especially that of Leandersson -- it takes guts to express the sagacity of an aging vampire without looking ludicrous.
“Let the Right One In” is one chilly and hair-raising film -- but for all the right reasons. Don’t let the aloof and undemonstrative surface fool you, the more it reverberates in the mind, the more one understands that it is about companionship. If only everyone could be as human as this vampire.
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