The main characters are a twelve year old boy being bullied at school who’s having fantasy’s about knifing someone and a centuries old vampire in a child’s body who could rip apart anyone else but with a pathological need to be protected. Around these orbit a man who may have paedophilic leanings and likes gassing people, a group of bullies and numerous people who seem intent on only drinking themselves into a stupor to deal with the monotony of life.
Welcome to the wonderfully creepy world of “Let The Right One In”.
An old fashioned horror film in the truest sense, Let The Right One In works not by shocking you with gore and jumps (there are no out of the seat moments in the film) but by showing you how deeply weird the world can be that the thing that makes most sense in it is a centuries old vampire in a child’s body. Whilst there are moments of violence, these brief flurries serve only to heighten the tension the film strives to create through slowly revealing the emerging romance between the two leads.
Whether you like this film rests on where you stand with regards this relationship – is it just two damaged children reaching out for each other or something more sinister? Figuring that out for yourself is part of the joy of the unhurried direction that never presents an easy answer to questions like this. Some people will have a hard time getting past the non romantic portrayal of child vampires, especially after more recent popular interpretations, however give it time and this will be the vampire film that people remember.
This film is glacially paced, but never feels long (it’s certainly shorter than most mainstream films released these days, and despite the subtitles this is a mainstream film) and I can’t recommend it enough – with one caveat – this film will get under your skin in a way few horrors do these days.
Midland Film Monkey 