 When you’re raised on American movies you’re not used to innocence in film. Even (or especially) movies about children are rife with manipulation and cynicism. The triumph of Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In is the purity of its storytelling. Essentially this is a tale of two desperately alone, twelve year old children who meet and fall in love one winter in Sweden. Alfredson’s technique is simple, genuine. He accomplishes poetic beauty by simply showing us a tree encrusted in snow. He achieves romance with a gift of a Rubik’s cube. The love presented here never approaches carnality though the principals involved share a bed naked. Every moment of connection between the two children is quiet, unforced, not contrived. Let the Right One In is a romance of two outcasts: Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant), because he is strange and timid and thus, a social and familial pariah and Eli (the enigmatically beautiful Lina Leandersson), the object of his affections, because she(he?)…is a vampire.
There is no romance in Eli’s condition. It is a brutal and terrifying state of affairs. Eli has no friends, no family, only a demented serial killer/father figure who goes around sparing her the act of murder by gassing innocent victims and draining them of their blood. When he is unable to attain what Eli needs she must go out and get it herself -- which she does with vicious efficiency. This life fills Eli with self-loathing. She knows she’s a monster and hates herself for it (sound like any twelve year old you’ve ever met?). The first thing she tells Oskar is that they cannot be friends. Oskar is only further intrigued by this pronouncement and as it turns out, is just eccentric enough to be the friend that Eli needs. He is not put off by her strange smell, the fact that her body is ice cold or that she only comes out at night or that she remains forever twelve. She is so grateful for his continued affection and courage that she becomes willing to do anything – to suffer anything – for him.
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| Let the Right One In is a Grimm’s fairytale for the twenty-first century, a cinematic sonnet to romantic love filled with stark images of cruelty and violent death. Even its tenderness is a dollop of color against a bracing backdrop of unrelenting winter. Metaphor is palpable in every shot, in every scenario, but never over-bearing. The truth of any story well told is that it must tell us something about ourselves. It reflects back to us like a many-faceted jewel, we have to recognize our own humanity in the pictures that we see. Let the Right One In achieves this and expands on our knowledge of ourselves. It lets us see the sides of ourselves we do not wish to see, helps us to view the desires we all share from which we turn away. After all, don’t we, as individuals, as nations, as people, feed off each other, survive at the expense of others in the world? We don’t necessarily want this. It terrifies us to bear witness to what we’re capable of. Other times, of course, we relish and revel in the wantonness of our desires.
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Sometimes our hunger for something as naked as revenge is so palpable we can touch it. Sometimes it becomes manifest if we want it bad enough. Let the Right One In is about just such a moment in time. As in real life neither revenge nor romance are as clear cut as it feels like they should be. Oskar loves Eli but when he learns that she is a vampire he is immediately aware of the danger and the horror involved. Granted, he’s a young boy but that he chooses to stay is telling and unsettling. If you commit to such a creature, you commit to a lot. Is Eli’s love for Oskar as pure as his for her? Or is this, in fact, how she ensnared Hakan, the strange murderer who takes care of her at the beginning of the movie. Does she need to get them when they’re young and impressionable and alone, like Oskar? It is a heartbreaking consideration, one the audience has a hard time facing because the central love affair feels so tender, so fragile. The audience is so viscerally aware of the childrens tremendous needs. Is Eli there for Oskar’s needs…or simply her own? Has she seduced him and further, seduced us? At the end, Eli’s final act of violence seals her bond with Oskar and the audience’s first instinct is to be happy for them. Is it, in fact, a happy ending?
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 | Alfredson doesn’t tell us and the two kids, marvelous in their openness, play everything straight. They let us in. We feel their fear, their pain, their isolation, as our own. Romance or enthrallment, there’s no other way for Eli to get what she needs – she has to give Oskar what he wants – spiritual connection. For Oskar, this connection is worth everything. There is a terrifying moment when Oskar challenges Eli to break a rule of vampire survival. She does so to horrifying consequence. Oskar promptly saves her and their bond is cemented. This bond is either a union of the purest romance or the most hideous spiritual enslavement…or both. Perhaps, Alfredson suggests, there really is no difference.
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