The Swedish movie, Let the Right One In takes the elements of a vampire movie and sifts it brilliantly and unflinchingly through the harsh troubles of a pre-adolescent. I never imagined a movie could remind me of the at times merciless cruelty of junior high kids in Todd Solondz’s Welcome to the Dollhouse and the oppressive fatalism of F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu at the same time. But this one did in its brutal yet heartfelt study of two 12-year olds, or more accurately, a 12-year old boy and a girl vampire stuck at that age, who are brought together by need, loneliness and the alienation from others.
The boy is Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant), who lives with his divorced mother though neither she nor his father really wants or pays attention to him. In school, he gets picked on by a sadistic bully who does not just call him names like “piggy” but also coerces his friends into whipping his body and across his face. Leading such a dreary life, one can see why he is almost driven to befriend Eli (Lina Leandersson), even if she is a vampire.
The best vampire movies understand that living forever in a fallen world feeding off other humans’ blood is an eternally dooming curse and so it is for Eli, whom we later realize has lived at the age of 12 for about 200 years. She also cannot go out into sunlight, of course, and Oskar first sees her sitting in solitude at a jungle gym outside their apartment at night while he is acting out with a knife on a tree a pretense of revenge towards his cruel bullies. It is certainly peculiar that he does not observe sooner that she is sitting so comfortably in the dead cold of a Swedish winter in just her pajamas and we sense that perhaps he has been so lonely and beaten down by life to notice. They find out that they live next door to each other although she warns him, “You can’t be friends with me.”
But they do become friends and even deeper although romance may be too simple a word to describe their strong bond. Perhaps it seems that way for Oskar initially as he coyly asks her, “Will you be my girlfriend?” to which Eli replies, “I am not a girl.” It is far deeper than romance in many ways, however, because it is forged by their urge to find a degree of trust and comfort away from their bleak despair – with one caused by external circumstances and the other by their internal violent nature (unless one considers being turned into a vampire after being bitten circumstantial, too).
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