Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Film Cold Weather, Hot Blood: Swedish Vampire Tale 'Let the Right One In' Is the Coolest Movie in Theaters
Posted by Jim Ridley on Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 9:09 AM
Just the other day, a friend of mine was saying she wished she could see another movie that shook her up as much as Pan's Labyrinth. I think I've got the movie. It's called Let the Right One In, a Swedish vampire thriller becoming a word-of-mouth phenomenon on the Internet. It opens Friday at the Belcourt.
Much of the attention Let the Right One In is getting comes from its place in an ongoing renaissance of vampire fiction. This includes not only the immensely popular novels of Stephenie Meyer and Middle Tennessee's Sherrilyn Kenyon (whose latest, One Silent Night, just debuted at No. 1 on the Times mass-market paperback list), but also the blockbuster movie version of Meyer's Twilight and the HBO series True Blood.
If that helps it get an audience, all the better. But this scary, engrossing and profoundly unsettling movie (based on a well-read novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist) deserves attention even from people who think they can't stand horror movies. I'd love to know if Kenyon has seen it, and what she thinks.
I rather liked the movie Twilight, even if I understand why many people don't: it's often pallid and listless, and portentous in the manner of a TV pilot setting up a series. At the same time, it has a refreshingly feminine point-of-view, it's madly romantic without shame, and it finds a new slant on Buffy the Vampire Slayer's gambit of using a morbid genre to poke around in the gloom and agony of Everyteen concerns. Being a vampire in Twilight is more like being a mobster in The Sopranos: a member of a treacherous, elevated inner circle who must appear normal to everyone else--a tricky deal, since you periodically have to kill somebody.
But the movie Twilight ducks all the moral problems raised by vampirism, and Let the Right One In doesn't. Its characters, a 12-year-old boy in an industrial Stockholm suburb and the 12-going-on-200-year-old wraith who befriends him, develop a special bond, then have to face the consequences of what their lives will be like if each accepts the other. In Twilight, this is mostly a romantic complication. In Let the Right One In, it means having to decide whether you can turn a blind eye to your loved one's periodic thirst for strangers.
Ironically, even though its characters are younger than Twilight's, Let the Right One In has (and deserves) a hard R rating: it has only a few gory scenes, but they're infernally effective. (A climactic scene involving a swimming pool is already becoming legend among horror fans.) But it's also beautifully filmed, acted with great empathy by its two young leads, and enhanced by sound design that tunes our ears to a universe of otherworldly swooshes and rustles.
Let the Right One In is the kind of surprise that makes you want to run out and tell people not to miss it. Consider it done.
Comments (9)
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...The Lost Boys? Pink, did you see that the Belcourt is playing it next weekend at midnight? Keifer, yummy
Gilbert: I like the Blade movies too, especially the first one. Weird how quickly Wesley Snipes plummeted from view (except in tabloids). Guillermo del Toro, who made Pan's Labyrinth, directed the second Blade.
What About: Yeah, I saw that the Belcourt was showing The Lost Boys. I haven't seen it since it came out, but at the time I remember thinking it should've been a lot better. Although most of the guys I hung out with in high school were like the Corey Feldman character. As was I, a surly little movie geek.
"Weird how quickly Wesley Snipes plummeted from view (except in tabloids)."
Well he's been a little busy messing with the IRS.
The IRS - now there a ripe subject for a REAL horror movie.
Even Dracula can't freeze your bank account and confiscate all your worldly goods.
What a fantastic film! A moody, startling love story that really does breathe new life into the genre. So much so, it's one of those films that nearly transcends horror or vampire categorization altogether. Instead, it's just a really compelling flick. Hats off to the Swedes for doing it right.
And Blade? C'mon. That's just bad Hollywood schlock.
Agreed about the movie transcending horror: it's more a really disturbing character study, and part of what makes it so unsettling is the severity (and the permanence) of the moral choices the young hero makes. (The farther I get from the movie, the more haunted I am by the figure of Eli's "father.") In a story about the inevitable loss of innocence, the last shot is creepy beyond words, in part because in some ways it looks like pure kids' adventure. When in fact there's nothing pure about it.
Also, I'd argue that the Blade movies are actually good Hollywood schlock. At least I'd be happy with them as a rental on a cold night.
Does anyone know if the Belcourt is holding this over? The turnout was huge last weekend, but they've got JCVD opening Friday.
Hello Mr. Pink,
LET THE RIGHT ONE IN will most likely close on Thu, Dec 18th and the response has indeed been great. Thanks for the shout-out on the film. Did you see JCVD yet? I'm curious to discover what people will think of that as well.
Haven't seen JCVD yet, as I'm waiting to see it on the big screen this weekend. But I love the trailer, and I actually like ol' Jean-Claude in an unironic way. He's always given off a hint of self-mockery, which is refreshing in someone who can roundhouse-kick your spleen into the next county. I sure can't imagine Chuck Norris making this movie.
