Bloody valentine in Let The Right One In

"But I’m not a girl," says Eli, adding that she has been 12 for a very long time. Divining that she is not the average girl next door, Oskar still wants her to be his friend. And he needs one, since he is bullied at school by the local sadist and doesn’t have much of a life at all.
In John Ajvide Lindqvist’s original book, which he and Alfredson adapted for the screen, Eli was de-sexed and made into a vampire in medieval times, but we get no explanations. However she came to be what she is, it is clear that Eli needs a friend too, particularly when old Hakan (Per Ragnar), her weird procurer, discovers the game is up and throws acid over his head.

From the start, the film is at no pains to put us in the picture. In the opening scene you can’t be sure what’s going on as you watch Hakan stringing someone up by his feet, putting a bucket under his head and bleeding the poor fellow to death. Gradually, however, we understand that the blood is to feed Eli.

When Hakan falls out of a hospital window, he allows Eli one last feed of his own blood before leaving her in desperate straits. She will now have to do her own kind of cooking.

As she gets closer to Oskar, she has to warn him off when he unwisely seeks to cement their friendship in blood. What will happen to these two firm friends? I can’t tell you without spoiling it, but I can say that in the end this isn’t so much a horror movie as a touching, romantic and even poetic story of pre-teen love and redemption.

The film-makers have managed this despite some quite nasty sequences of blood and gore (though accomplished without undue emphasis) and with the good offices of cinematographer Hoyle van Hoytama, who paints the small town circa 1982 with real skill. In the middle of a harsh and unforgiving winter, he creates a place where anything might happen, though nothing generally does.

Above all, the two children, Hedebrant as Oskar and Leandersson as Eli, are marvellously natural performers who carry a sometimes fractured film from point to point with stunning realism.
You might say that realism was not the name of this particular game but even Eli, scaling outside pipes like a professional burglar and jumping on her victims from a great height, seems a proper little person as much as some ghastly sprite.

Alfredson’s editing style means that, on occasion, he won’t leave his sequences alone to expand naturally, and a certain choppiness results. All the same, he and his team have conjured up, from a remarkable piece of writing, one of the best, most imaginative and resonant vampire stories I’ve seen.

Let The Right One In (Lat Den Ratte Komma In)
Cert: 15