Cast: Kare Hedebrant, Lina Leandersson

Director: Tomas Alfredson

Screenplay: John Lindqvist

Running time: 1 hr 54 mins

Genre: Horror/Romance/Foreign



CRITIQUE:


If there is ever a vampire flick to watch in 2008, it has to be Tomas Alfredson’s darkly atmospheric LET THE RIGHT ONE IN (a strangely protean title for a film of many faces). TWILIGHT seem to have been amassing a storm of buzz, especially lusty teenage girls of virtually anywhere, and gets the Hollywood treatment this month, but it’s this film of the same hybrid that feels like a superior piece. Sure, as a Swedish film, it’s not hard to predict this to end up as underseen, as subtitles-reading puts off anyone under seventeen. Bastards who keeled away from PAN’S LABYRINTH and APOCALYPTO don’t know what they’re missing. Whilst, this may not be on the level of the aforementioned Oscar-nominated films, LET THE RIGHT ONE IN will remain as a reminder that a dying genre will always have an elixir of life. For one, it’s an unconventional effort with European sensibilities, infusing anti-Hollywood techniques (storytelling over spectacle), and secondly, it takes the vampire genre into a wholly distinct territory. This tale of a misplaced boy, Oskar, easily bullied and fragile, meeting his femme fatale Eli, a vampire trapped inside a 12-year old girl’s body, seems a familiar ground but its filmmaking takes this into new heights. What could easily turn into an all-out gore blood-lusty carnage attached to vampire films has been restrained by a pitch-perfect use of poetic visuals and impeccable framings. The use of the almost bare Swedish snow landscape may appear as minimalist, but it creates a chilling atmosphere that mirrors the soul of the two major protagonists. Sentimentality sidestepped, as the body count increases, the odd romance grows, as this two 12-year-old outsiders search for belongingness – and the story’s result is a hymn to adolescence and the pangs of young, impossible love.


VERDICT:

Let not the bloodsucking, slow-burning narrative fool you, this is a wisely created film that injects a much-needed intelligent storytelling to a genre that’s losing its own blood. The visuals are superb and the tale works as an eerie fable, chilling and darkly elegiac.


RATING: A-