It's never too late to 'Let the Right One In'

June 12, 2:54 PMKansas City Indie Movie ExaminerZach Hoskins

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   Let the Right One In is now available on DVD and Blu-ray from
   Magnolia Home Entertainment.

Let the Right One In
(Tomas Alfredson, 2008)
Now on DVD and Blu-ray

One of the great tragedies of movie buffdom - at least for us mere mortals - is that there are always more worthwhile films to be seen than there are hours, days, years, or lifetimes in which to see them. No matter how dedicated a viewer you might be, no matter how incessantly your friends and colleagues might recommend, urge, and cajole you into seeing it, there will always be the odd film that slips through the cracks, unseen and unloved: the One That Got Away. Then, six months or a year or ten years later, when everyone else has moved on to the next big thing content in the knowledge that they've seen what came before, you'll look back with misty-eyed regret at the film you missed, and shed a silent tear for What Might Have Been.

For this writer (remember, it happens to everybody!), that film was almost Let the Right One In: the visionary Swedish vampire drama that earned accolades (including "Best Foreign Language Film" from the Kansas CIty Film Critics Circle) and critical raves all through its international release last year, but somehow still didn't manage to entice yours truly to the theatre. In the movie's defense, the failure was all mine: I saw the chilling, ethereal trailer, I heard the excellent word-of-mouth, my interest was decidedly piqued, but something (Too busy? Lazy? Broke?) kept me from following through and actually seeing it. So when Let the Right One In came to home video this March, I dutifully added it to my Netflix queue...where it proceeded to languish for three months, buried under a series of lesser DVDs I am frankly too embarrassed to name. Finally, in a moment of pure serendipity, my horror-loving fiancée decided to pick it up at the store instead of My Bloody Valentine 3D; when I settled in to watch it with her that evening, nearly eight months after first seeing that trailer, my excitement was overshadowed by the guilt that can only stem from negligence of the worst degree.

I begin with this rather long-winded introduction in order to let you know two things: first, that even intelligent, well-informed, handsome and otherwise essentially perfect indie film writers like myself are human and therefore fallible; and second, that even if the story related on the previous paragraph sounds distressingly close to your own experience, Let the Right One In absolutely lives up to the hype, and is worth seeing no matter how late to the party you might be. It is, simply put, the most brilliant, engaging, and original horror film I have seen since 2007's The Orphanage; and if that doesn't sound like high enough praise to you, then consider that it is also probably the most interesting take on vampire mythology since F.W. Murnau plagiarized Bram Stoker with Nosferatu in 1922.

What makes Let the Right One In such a fascinating film is, in part, how closely it adheres to the accepted clichés of the vampire genre. Unlike recent, lesser efforts like Catherine Hardwicke's Twilight, writer John Ajvide Lindqvist sees no need to embellish with body glitter or Tarzan-like tree jumping: the film's title itself is a reference to the notion that vampires can only enter a house when invited, while elsewhere most of the other typical generic trappings are accounted for, from the need to sleep by day to the ability to scale the sides of buildings to eternal youth. Where Lindqvist innovates, and brilliantly so, is in the details. Indeed, some of the most shocking moments in the film deal with these most taken-for-granted of vampire "facts": like when Eli, the "Right One" of the title, comes into the home of her 12-year-old human friend Oskar without his invitation, prompting grisly results. Or when a character bursts into flame upon contact with sunlight, an occurrence that is unexpected largely by way of its sheer expectedness. And then there is the fact that, while Right One is hardly shy about the more monstrous aspects of vampirism (Eli, though sympathetic, is nowhere near as defanged as Twilight's anemic Edward), most of the film's most reprehensible acts are not committed by vampires at all. The first murder we see - a teenaged hiker hung upside-down from a tree, his throat slit and the blood funneled into a large plastic jug - is performed by human hands, its frank framing in long shot giving the act a chillingly mundane quality. Far more sickening, however, are the acts of cruelty meted out to our protagonist Oskar by a group of preteen tormentors, which increase in violence and brutality until by the end of the movie (if you're anything like me, at least) you're rooting for Eli to swoop in and suck them all dry.

This element of humanity, in both its positive and negative aspects, is the other part of Let the Right One In's unique appeal. Like Twilight and HBO's True Blood, Right One pays lip service to the carnal aspects of the vampire legend; but because of the youth of its protagonists and a general, commendable sense of narrative restraint, its love story is both sympathetic and oddly pure. Oskar is no innocent naïf seduced by duplicitous monster Eli, but a disturbed victim of bullying who clips out and saves news articles about murders as a means of fabricating his own violent revenge fantasies. As Eli points out, the first time she meets Oskar he is stabbing a tree and commanding it to "squeal like a pig"; "I'm like you," she says, and the moment is as intimate as it is troubling. In the end, it is difficult to even call Let the Right One In a horror film, at least not in any purist's sense of the word: for all of its creepy moments, and it does have more than a few, the film is primarily a story of first love between misfits who were made for each other. Credit here must go to young stars Kåre Hedebrant and Lina Leandersson, for each of whom this is astonishingly their first film. Both actors strike just the right balance of pathos and repulsion, with Leandersson in particular becoming equally, improbably believable as both a menacing figure of terror and an adorable first crush, Yet, again unlike a certain other vampire movie I probably don't even need to name anymore, Right One never stoops to the level of goopy young adult romance - or, worse, thinly-veiled abstinence lecture. Director Tomas Alfredson and cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema keep an admirable distance that allows their characters space to breathe, photographing the setting (the Stockholm suburb of Blackeberg, in the early 1980s) with an atmospheric, frosty stillness that makes the abnormally pale-skinned Oskar and Eli seem right at home.

In short, Let the Right One In is a rare pleasure; a genre film that takes the stalest conventions of its genre, twists them, and in so doing makes them feel fresh again. I'm sure that in years to come, makers and aficionados of serious vampire films will still be talking about little Eli; and if you, like me, missed her on the big screen and the New Releases shelf, I'm sure she won't mind if you invite her into your home now. Better late than never.

Let the Right One In is now available on DVD and Blu-ray from Magnolia Home Entertainment. The DVD retails for $26.98 and the Blu-ray for $34.98 MSRP, but bargain hunters should have no trouble finding it for much cheaper.