The Times Quotidian

Let The Right One In [Låt den rätte komma in]

It is the cold deep winter of northern Sweden. Snow falls upon the well-kept, charmless suburb of Blackeberg.  An old man is covering the windows of his apartment with a patchwork of corrugated cardboard, some of it with chunks of advertising left on. Inside, he readies a set of very used equipment for a grisly mission, to provide fresh human blood for the young vampire who is his “daughter”.  In the same building lives a young boy and his mother. The child is 12-year-old Oskar, (Kåre Hedebrant) a gentle, introverted, and highly intelligent boy, with flaxen hair and an angelic face. At school, he is the perfect mark for a group of bullies who taunt and humiliate him. Later, in the courtyard of his apartment, he acts out his anger by viciously stabbing a tree. Here he meets Eli, (Lina Leandersson) a strange young girl who is his neighbor, and their love story begins.

According to medieval legends, the north is the land where witches and all manner of evil spirits originate. The cold North is first character of this tale, from a novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist, which owes much to the spirit of Hans Christian Andersen at his most chillingly tender. There is something reminiscent of Andersen’s The Snow Queen in the seductive and gentle aspect of evil, which nestles close to the beautiful innocence of first love in the midst of a world where the ice is a metaphor for a soul not quite dead but in frozen suspension. Filmmaker Tomas Alfredson is attuned to the mesmerizing filmic power of snow and ice; of glass, of water and of the dark. (Production of the film was moved to Luleå in the north of Sweden to capture the snowier winter there.) Stylistically, the film inspires all the usual clichés such as tour de force, etc. The quotidian qualities of murder and violence are treated with a disciplined and sensitive eye, trained in tableau and composition by the likes of Dreyer; and a sensibility steeped in the textual symbolism of Bergman. The steamy warmth of indoor swimming is contrasted with the frozen ice of a snowy river. The ice and snow literally blanket and encrust horrific crimes. The glass, cousin symbol to ice (see the film excerpt) functions as separation and reflection; it is a symbol which deeply resonates, given a vampire’s relation to glass as a purveyor and reflector of light. Glass can be the vampire’s worst enemy, but ice and snow, treacherous to humans, are to the vampire harmless allies.

The unrelenting menace of cold and ice is the first to be dispelled by the magical Eli, a 12-year-old vampire who wanders around at night in a light tee shirt and does not shiver.  Hers is an extraordinary isolation, interrupted only by brief violent interludes wherein she attacks this or that robust victim to feed on their blood; but to the innocent Oskar she is a kindred soul, an outsider who represents, in her seeming independence, the sort of empowered being that Oskar wishes to be. She quietly amazes the lonely boy, who begins his subtle transformation to manhood soon after they meet. He aspires to physical strength, dreams of retribution against his enemies, and at her instigation, he bashes one of his tormenters in the head, sending the boy to the hospital (and setting up the final ghastly scene). Gradually the two children come to trust and love one another, even as the macabre violence of Eli’s feeding regimen proliferates. The man who is supposedly “her father”–although she has been twelve for “a very long time”, maybe forever–dies a spectacularly horrific yet voluntary death once it becomes clear he can no longer be of help in sustaining Eli’s life. This turn of events makes it necessary for Eli to leave town, and briefly, it seems that Oskar may have outgrown her. As it turns out, she makes a brief but fortuitous return, the two go off together, and we the audience are happy for them, even as we are horrified.

This is a quiet film that uses understatement in a sophisticated and drole manner. There are murders, and blood, but the focus stays calmly upon emerging love between Oskar and Eli. Is it innocent and “beautiful” or demented and cruelly exclusive?  Does this love engender a kind of deeply poetic justice or a perverse revel in retribution? The powers of this fairytale are given great psychological breathing space by allowing silence and space and eschewing the American tendency to edit for shock and gasp. As a play of the unconscious, this story can be read as dream, where Eli is an imagined figure of the charming weakling Oskar, reflecting his desire to wreck havoc and revenge on the cruel and powerful boys who torture him. Like every good horror movie, there is a deeply disturbing aspect to the blood curdling satisfaction that is Oskar’s as the film closes, for he has come out on top only to lose his soul. Thus, the deeply moral rigor that gives all fairytales their power, demonstrates to us the innocent charm and alluring mask of love, while intimating of this gentle love’s unquenchable thirst for blood.