connielane: (Default)
connielane ([personal profile] connielane) wrote2008-10-25 08:07 pm
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If you want to watch a vampire-in-love movie...

...but don't want to watch Twilight, I've got a good one for you.


Let the Right One In


This is ... I guess technically a horror film, but it doesn't often feel like one. It's a Swedish-language film, so it has subtitles, and it has an enormous amount of emotional complexity. The main character is Oskar, a twelve-year-old boy who is taunted and bullied by some boys at school. He doesn't fight back, but he fantasizes about getting revenge and rehearses knife fights in the courtyard of his apartment building at night. One of these nights, he meets Eli, a mysterious girl who is "twelve ... more or less." It's not long before we learn that she is a vampire, but though this is a fantasy/horror element, it's handled in a very naturalistic way, played entirely for realism.

We see Eli's father (ETA: most likely not her father, actually, now that I think about it) forced to go out and commit murders, to drain the victims' blood into a huge jar so that he can feed his daughter. And we watch him go through this elaborate process of packing all the materials for this job into a case. He's not very bright about what he does either, which reinforces the feeling that he is not unaware in the slightest what an abomination he is committing. But he has no choice. It's either this or let his child die. And Oskar, while he's quite fond of Eli, mirrors the audience disgust with what she is and what she does to people.

One of the things I enjoyed most about the film, though, was its treatment of classic vampire lore. We know very early on that vampires in this reality can't go inside a place of dwelling without being invited, but the twist is that we find out why they can't. Because unlike, say, the Buffyverse, where vampires bump into the empty doorway like there's an invisible wall there, this movie lets a vampire come through the doorway. It's what happens after they come in uninvited that makes the rule. And while in most vampire lore the body of a person who has become a vampire stays the same age but their mind and emotions keep maturing, this movie does something different. Eli's body stays the same age, but her mind and emotions stay the same age as well, for the most part. She's very clearly not a forty-year-old or whatever in a twelve-year-old's body - her emotions are that of a twelve-year=old girl, which makes her killing even creepier and makes her friendship/love dynamic with Oskar somewhat less disturbing.

This is just a fantastic film - scary, with some good chair-jumper scares, and gory without being over-the-top. It reminds me a lot of May, actually. And one of those rare movies where you will actively root for the murder of children. :P