For many years, two things associated with Sweden – the prospect of assembling flat pack furniture, and anything to do with ABBA – have been enough to make me break out into a cold sweat. So I approached the Swedish vampire film Let the Right One In with some trepidation, especially as the average horror film, no matter how ridiculous the script and acting, is usually enough to leave me on edge for weeks afterwards. However, the adrenaline running round my veins as I left the cinema was not the result of fear, but of seeing a film that had thrilled me.
Let the Right One In is set in 1982 in Blackeberg, a small Swedish town near Stockholm. Oskar is a twelve-year-old who lives with his mother in a modern housing complex that could as easily be in the suburbs of any European city. Bullied at school and largely ignored by his divorced parents, his life is one of constant loneliness until he meets Eli, his new neighbour, who thinks she’s twelve too. Their friendship develops, slowly stumbling towards an uneasy romance as they overcome their mutual isolation. Oskar’s isolation is largely the result of the bullying and feeling that he doesn’t fit in at school; Eli’s isolation is the result of being a vampire.
At first, Eli’s vampirism is barely an issue for them. Instead of flying around town in search of victims, she relies on Hakan, her enigmatic adult companion, to slaughter strangers and bring her the blood. But when Hakan bungles a murder and is arrested, she has to start killing people herself, and resist the temptation to kill Oskar, her only friend.
Alfredson handles the deaths of the various victims with a light touch, creating moments of black humour (There is a particularly funny scene when two schoolgirls discover a dead body in the ice) where other directors would find the temptation of a gorefest irresistible.
But the killings are almost incidental to the film; the main focus is always the relationship between Oskar and Eli. We are never allowed to forget that Eli is as much confused pre-teen as vampire, or that she and Oskar are both at a difficult, in-between age, neither children nor young adults. This liminality of their existence is reflected in the way most of the action takes place in locations that are equally hard to categorise: is the courtyard where they first meet part of a building and therefore safe or is it outside and wild? Do walls and a ceiling make the subway where she kills her first victim inside or out? Do normal school rules apply when you’re on a field trip? Even the snow that falls constantly begs the question of whether its transformation of the world visually leaves it the same place or a radically different one. Mutability also affects the political world: a reference to Brezhnev on the radio reminds you that the 80s was a decade of transition, with communism moribund but not yet dead, capitalism thriving but not yet secure enough in itself to declare victory.
Like the best art, the film raises these questions without ever answering them definitively, just as, through fine acting and direction, it resists definition into any clear genre. Let the Right One In is horror and comedy, teen romance and psychological drama, highly poetic and grimly urban, often in the same scene. But it is never dull, never silly, and never anything other than captivating.
A Hollywood remake is, inevitably, already in the pipeline, but take the opportunity to see the original version on the big screen now. You’re unlikely to be scared, but you’re very likely to be reminded that Europe is still more than capable of producing brilliant, haunting cinema.