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This article was written as a response to a number of people I know who didn’t see much anything worthwhile in the film in question. I liked it a whole bunch, and basically just wanted to state, as cogently as I could muster, why. Any feedback, dissenting or otherwise, would be wonderful.

In Clint Eastwood’s pivotal Boston-noir piece Mystic River (2003), Tim Robbins plays a broken man named Dave who was, as a young boy, abducted, abused and raped by a couple of pedophiles. In the wake of the murder of his childhood friend’s daughter, Dave’s long-fragile psyche begins a tragic descent into complete psychosis, and after his wife arrives home late one night to find him watching “some vampire movie” in a despondent slump, he makes the following desperate and disjointed attempt to explain things to her:

Know what I was thinking about? Vampires… [t]hey’re un-dead, but I think maybe there’s something beautiful about it. Maybe one day you wake up and you forget what it’s like to be human. Maybe then it’s okay… They [the kidnappers] were wolves, and Dave was the boy who escaped from wolves… They took me on a four-day ride. They buried me in this ratty old cellar with a sleeping bag. And man, Celeste, did they have their fun… Dave’s dead. I don’t know who came out of that cellar, but it sure as shit wasn’t Dave. You see, honey… it’s like vampires. Once it’s in you, it stays.

This is the metaphor at the heart of Let the Right One In, although it doesn’t really stop there. It’s at the heart of the film, all through its veins and sometimes right out its orifices – taken to such plentiful extremes that it becomes damn-near literal. I don’t say this as rebuke or criticism: extremity of metaphor is a staple of all great horror, and if, for the Victorian gothic novel, vampirism was nothing less than sexuality itself (base, exotic, dangerous and irresistible), then for twenty-first century audiences it must find a more contemporary taboo. The one best suited, as Let the Right One In demonstrates, is paedophilia, turning everything about the vampiric condition that is monstrously sexual into something about the human condition that is sexually monstrous.

Twelve year-old Oskar (Kare Hedebrant) lives with his mother in an apartment complex, surrounded by snowy, small-town Sweden and severe, peer-based victimization. Eli (Lina Leandersson), also twelve, has just moved into the adjoining apartment, accompanied by an old man who seems oddly subservient to her. That’s the least of what’s odd about Eli, though – higher up on the list are that she only appears at night, she can fly and she lives off human blood. Namely for those reasons, she tells Oskar right off the bat that they can’t be friends… but she doesn’t really enforce it. Before too long, friends is just what they are, and before much longer, there’s definite prepubescent romance.

There’s a few qualifications I should make about that summary, but before I do I’d like to point out that getting bogged down in the plot specifics of a film like this is a mistake – it isn’t uneventful, but it is slow, and situational, and atmospheric. And reading it as a horror film (at least in the traditional sense) is a mistake, too – there’s blood and death and darkness, but nothing that overrides the increasing sensibility of pathos. Everything that is here expressed of gore and terror is just an echo; a perpetuation of whatever despicable act drained the colour from Eli’s face and haunts her eyes with despair. In this particular case it was supernatural, but it could easily have been completely human; such is the transcendence of Leandersson’s performance and presence, which consistently project innocence that’s been wounded by the world.

I mention that both the children live with adult guardians, but for all the film’s intents and purposes they live alone, syphoned off from the rest of humanity by sheer indifference on humanity’s part. The adults of the town get to gather in restaurants and have drinks and discuss politics (Russians and rattlesnakes), and for them, the events of Let the Right One In probably do feel, unreservedly, like a horror movie. There’s something coldly unsympathetic about their plight, though, because they are complacent pieces in the irresponsible society that got these kids so damaged in the first place. Even before the insertion of a vampire child, this is evident: no one seems to care that Oskar spends his time wandering around by himself in the snow, threatening imaginary fiends like a little Travis Bickle, or standing in solitude before a window, linking hands with his own reflection. He isn’t damaged like Eli, but he’s getting there – he is a chronic misfit, and if she hadn’t shown up, then the school bully (whose torments harbour disturbing elements of homosexual sadomasochism) would probably have killed him. By the same token, if Eli hadn’t met Oskar, she probably wouldn’t have ever remembered how to smile, or feel things. What it’s like to be human. It’s their very isolation that connects them, which is established early on: “I want to be left alone,” she tells him when they both find themselves sitting in the courtyard. “So do I,” he retorts, and so they tacitly concede to be alone, together.

Of course, Eli’s isolation is deeper than Oskar’s, born of her affliction and, we suspect, the unsavoury relationship she has with the old man who shelters her. We don’t get much explicit dictation on the nature of this relationship (though there is something about Eli’s sexual history that is made incredibly explicit), but as I’ve intimated, it’s mostly the vampire part that lays the sexual abuse undertones: years ago, some human animal did something awful to this little girl, and now she’s cursed with it, closed off from intimacy, eternally arrested in the moment of her ruin.  “I’ve been twelve for a long time,” she admits to Oskar – like Dave of Mystic River, Eli never came out of the cellar.

But because Oskar knows his fair share of abuse and neglect and loneliness, the nice part is that she doesn’t have to – he’s perfectly willing to keep her company down there, and maybe shed a light or two. It takes a while for each to get used to this arrangement: still with most his innocence intact, Oskar can’t help but stumble occasionally over the dangerous terrain of Eli’s dark maturity. He offers her candy, but consuming solid food makes her ill; he tries to cement their bond by playing blood-brothers, but she runs scared for the hunger; and, upon discovering what she is, he plays an innocuous game of getting her to enter uninvited, which invokes a terribly un-innocuous consequence (and confronts his prepubescent mind with a spectacularly grotesque menstruation metaphor). Make no mistake though: this is not about coming of age, because age, through the tragic conceptions of this film, is evil. It’s about forging a youthful light and warmth against night and snow, and if the end result finds itself morally dialectic (which the climactic scene, taking place by a swimming pool, surely does), then it isn’t the fault of Eli and Oskar, but of everybody else.

Particularly with regards to this last, the film shares a specific characteristic with Guillermo Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), in that it is an adult movie about children dealing with adult matters that never betrays the child’s guileless perspective. This is more the achievement of Alfredson that one might think: from what I’ve heard of the original novel, a great deal of things (including the revelation regarding Eli’s sexuality that I haven’t much discussed) were dwelt upon in detail that are here simply, and very wisely, hinted at. We don’t need to see the act of destruction, merely the aftermath of desolation, and we don’t need the implications galvanized, merely the metaphors extreme. This approach may lead to misconstruction, but it’s also infinitely more poetic.

What I mean is, sexuality is the elephant in the room through most of Let the Right One In, and though everybody duly refrains from talking about it, we do occasionally catch them glancing, uneasily, in its direction—Eli’s guardian asks that she do one thing for him, and “not see that boy tonight”, to which she responds by gently stroking the old man’s face, while Oskar’s once-in-a-blue-moon visit to his father is ruined by the arrival of a creepy family friend who won’t stop staring at him. So when, in a bed-sharing scene, the two children agree to officially “go steady”, we may accidentally read their intimacy and mild physicality as prematurely sexual – it isn’t. It is, as is all the film, the emotional solidarity of children unloved, reaching out through the adult damage they’ve sustained to find that beautifully innocent state of engagement: ‘I really like you’. Even if you are a misfit; even if you are a monster.

Related posts:

1. "Daddy, help me, please!": The obvious but necessary interpretation of A Nightmare on Elm Street
2. Night of the Living Dead and the Rise of Exploitation Cinema