Låt den rätte komma in
Tomas Alfredson (2008)
Based on a novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist (who also did the screenplay), this Swedish film blends the lineaments of the vampire movie with familiar themes from what might be called the cinema of childhood isolation and growing pains. Twelve-year-old Oskar is the child of a broken marriage and he needs a friend (cf ET). He’s ridiculed and bullied at school (cf Carrie). Friendship/first love arrives in the form of Eli, the vampire girl next door in the apartment block (in a Stockholm suburb) where Oskar lives with his mother. Eli also proves to be his avenging angel as far as the school gang is concerned. Oskar is pre-pubertal; Eli tells him she’s been twelve for a long time. At the end of the film, we see Oskar in a train compartment, tapping out the Morse code which he and Eli have used throughout. It’s not clear that he’s headed anywhere but the two of them appear to be in a long-term relationship, perhaps an imperishable communion. (We assume that Eli is packed in Oskar’s luggage.) Let the Right One In is a rite-of-passage picture of a peculiar kind. It seems to be about deciding not to grow up.
The children here are the dominant psyches and agents – Oskar, Eli, the bullying Conny and his acolytes – and their looks reflect some imaginative physical casting. In the role of Oskar, blond, pale Kåre Hedebrant has a slightly androgynous quality. He can appear ordinary, as well as ethereal – so that he seems sometimes to belong to a different species from Eli, sometimes to express the fact that they’re made for each other. As Eli, the dark-haired, gracefully grave Lina Leandersson suggests an arrested development – arrested at a point at which Eli had already achieved an inchoate sexual presence: Oskar always seems younger than her, in body and soul. The fact that Conny and his henchmen are conventionally good-looking kids who are not expressionist studies of their souls reinforces their vicious impact. In comparison, the grown-ups are ineffectual. Oskar’s mother isn’t much more than an unremarkable pretty face: she consoles or scolds her son but she’s perfunctory and empty-headed in either mode. His father, whom Oskar visits regularly, is handsome, genial and seemingly weak-willed. (A scene in which he and his son are playing a game together, which is interrupted by the arrival of a (male) friend of Oskar’s father, has an emotional weight that’s oddly increased by the fact that nothing overtly dramatic happens as a result.) The hispanic PE teacher at the boys’ school is comically (or that’s the idea) ridiculous.
In spite of the rate at which deaths in suspicious circumstances occur in the community, the police, after an early visit to speak to Oskar’s school class, are often conspicuous by their absence. The only adult character of substance and consequence is Eli’s companion Håkan – a father figure even if he’s not her biological father. Håkan is a serial killer – in order to supply Eli with the nourishment she needs. When his latest intended victim escapes, Håkan disfigures himself (by pouring acid onto his face) so that he’s unrecognizable. He then turns himself in. Eli visits him in hospital, where he offers his neck and she accepts the offer. From this point onwards, she has to seek out her own victims. The moral seems to be that parents are inevitably disappointing – they can’t satisfy the demands of their children.
There’s another group of adults, who congregate in a local bar and in the grungy apartment of one of their number. (The apartment is dominated by a collection of stray cats which, if they’re not feral to start with, certainly are once they sense the approach of a vampire.) This collection of no-hopers are, at different stages of the story, both witnesses to and victims of the attacks by Eli and Håkan. When they’re not themselves being assaulted, they show a remarkable lack of initiative in doing something about what they’ve seen. (They include a man called Lacke and his girlfriend, Ginia, the one woman in the group. When Eli lands on Ginia, Lacke intervenes to detach the two women and one of his pals comes running along to help – but they make no effort to apprehend Eli, who doesn’t disappear that quickly from the scene.) Perhaps Tomas Alfredson and John Ajvide Lindqvist are using these characters to underline the uselessness of grown-ups but I think they’re given more screen time than they’re worth. They also seem to interrupt the child’s perspective that prevails throughout most of the film.
Let the Right One In oftens looks very beautiful. Alfredson (who also edited the film, with Daniel Jonsäter) and his cinematographer, Hoyte van Hoytema, create some images which are tonally and texturally marvellous. They use both the natural and manmade aspects of the locale to do this: the sparkling winter trees and the glum apartment blocks seem equally soulless. The colour schemes and contrasts, powerfully simple, apply to the people as well as to the landscapes: Oskar is blue and golden-white, Eli black and red. The blood in the film is photographed so that it achieves what might be described as emotional fluidity. Although there’s plenty of mayhem, Alfredson balances it with scenes that derive their power from the threat rather than acts of violence. And some of the vampiric tropes are very effective – especially the way that Eli launches herself on her victims. At these moments, this weightless creature becomes startlingly substantial.
I think I was the oldest person in the small audience I saw the picture with. I couldn’t help but be struck by the enthusiasm for the gory high points – especially the shocking violence of the climax. Yet the twenty-somethings giggling that the film was ‘so brilliant, really funny’ were, I thought, kidding themselves – although I’m not quite sure how. Their laughter was forced – perhaps to subdue their being shaken by what they’d seen, perhaps an expression of uneasy puzzlement. Let the Right One In is a clever, stylish and unsettling piece of work but I didn’t like it (it’s been more enjoyable thinking about the film and writing this note than it was to watch it). I find that hard to explain too. I think it may have to do with Tomas Alfredson’s rather shallow attempts to present Eli’s vampirism as a human predicament (almost as a form of disability) – and the relationship between her and Oskar in a way that provokes in us the emotional responses we’re primed to make to a story of less unusual thwarted lovers. (The emotionality of parts of Johan Söderqvist’s music is certainly conventional.) Alfredson’s thoroughgoing manipulation doesn’t exactly reduce the effectiveness of the picture but it’s alienating. Iit confirms it as an exercise in style which is heartlessly sophisticated. Heartless sophistication is OK if it’s funny but, in spite of the overemphatic laughter I heard around me, Let the Right One In doesn’t have a sense of humour.
13 May 2009
