Review of Let the Right One In (2008) by Petew — 31 Mar 2009

From the reviews I'd read I expected something fresh and interesting from this one, but in the end it did nothing for me. First, the grim aesthetics made me squirm: everything is unremittingly ugly, faded, and bleak, and the characters show a typical Scandinavian lack of affect or animation (I do realize this is deliberate, but I've never liked the whole Lars von Trier masochism-as-art idea).

Second, while the premise was admittedly original (a vampire story told from the perspective of children, without flinching on the violence and gore) the story is actually quite weak, replete with stock characters (the Inattentive Parents, the Bully, the Mysterious Girl Next Door), clumsily engineered twists (the guy brings a jar of acid to splash on his face so the police won't be able to identify him if he gets caught? What century does he think this is?), and a great deal of disturbing and improbable child-on-child violence, even when the vampire girl isn't around.

Lastly, while I get that the movie is trying to make a point about how children can be both touchingly innocent and shockingly bloodthirsty (as when the protagonist fantasizes about stabbing the bullies with a hunting knife), I guess I'm just past the point where I think that kind of thing is cool and edgy.

I like a nice cathartic bloodbath in a movie as much as anyone (heck, so did Shakespeare), but watching a roomful of scared kids get turned into chum by a creepy little girl left me no wiser about how violence begets violence or what-have-you; It was just disgusting and gratuitous, doubly so when you realize that she "did it out of love" or some such nonsense.

Overall, an unsatisfying and pretentious film. I suspect the only reason it's received such good word-of-mouth is that the only people who bother to watch it are the ones who think doing so makes them seem sophisticated and clever.