After months and months of anticipation, encompassing countless breathless reviews, surprise festival accolades, and angry warnings from supporters of the Swedish vampire film that I’d better stop dismissing it as “The Swedish Vampire Film”, there was probably no way in frozen-over Scandinavian hell that Let the Right One In could have lived up to the hype. So––sorry––but I don’t think it’s a masterpiece. That said, I find its widespread popularity to be extremely encouraging. Aside from its lovely cinematography and sensitive child-actor performances, Right One’s real selling point is the humanist gild it lays on its genre lilly. Maybe this is why I’m less than blown-away by it––it’s hardly the first film I’ve seen this week which uses basic genre tropes to delve deeper into everyday human horrors––but if this a new trend, I’ll have more, please.
Oskar (KÃ¥re Hedebrant) is a scrawny 12 year-old child of divorce who spends most of his time alone, updating a scrapbook devoted to a number of local murders/bloodlettings, and practicing the revenge against the school’s gang of bullies which he can’t get up the balls to actually enact. One night in the courtyard of the depressingly nondescript apartment where he lives with his mom, Oskar meets a bedraggled girl named Eli (Lina Leandersson), who also claims to be “12…more or less.” Eli catches Oskar making his imaginary bully threats and seems intrigued, but the mysterious girl insists that she and her neighbor cannot be friends. “I want to be alone,” says the teenage Garbo. “So do I,” counters Oskar. And yet soon they’re meeting up every night, and trading brief romantic messages via Morse code through their apartment walls. It’s not until after Eli has agreed to go steady that Oskar puts the pieces together, and realizes that the female salve to his soul-sucking loneliness is actually a blood-sucking killer. But is that really any scarier than the barely-pubescent nihilists in his class who try on more than one occasion to drown him?
Right One’s basic point is that human status is not a guarantor of humanity. There are humans who prey on other humans because they’re cruel and unfeeling and genuinely like to be the cause of pain, and there are former humans who have supernatural disease which requires them to prey on current humans so they can drink their blood, but these former humans may be more capable of love and kindness than the non-undead. Set in deep winter (all the better climes for teen romance to thaw frozen fingers and distract from runny-noses), and bathed in a shiny, ice-blue glow (all the better to highlight the pools of blood, which are inserted relatively judiciously), it’s hard to imaging Right One looking better or more successfully conveying the coldness of the everyday human world. This is nice.
And yet, Right one is hardly above critique. Its construction is problematically loose, with a script full of throwaway narrative turns and straight out plot holes. And it’s not that subversive. What seems like the natural place to end the film––on a realistically sad echo of a heart-tugging early image––is counteracted by a last-minute victory of sorts, leading to a getaway happy ending which feels tacked on and improbably sunny. Right One is certainly well-made and miles more thoughtful than you might expect a teenage vampire film to be, but if I’ve learned one thing this week at Fantastic Fest, it’s that we shouldn’t necessarily have to keep our expectations of international genre films all that low. Let the Right One In is good enough, but it’s okay to ask for more.
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