Review of Let the Right One In (2008) by Axelkoch — 02 Nov 2013

Gory thrillers are basically all that Scandinavian movies are famous for worldwide and Tomas Alfredson doesn’t want to share away from this with his vampire flick Let the Right One In (Låt den rätte komma in). But the Swedish production that has been showed at pretty much any film festival imaginable still isn’t what you’d call mainstream. The main characters are a twelve-year-old bullying victim and a vampiress of the same age just that she’s been twelve for a longer time. Now does that sound odd to you? Well, it is. Damn right it is.

To spice up the somberly snowed landscape of the northernmost part of Europe with some blood is a great idea stylistically and the Dutch cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema knows exactly how can he make the murder scenes rememberable. However, he’s quite a singularity with this in the cast of Let the Right One In. One could pick on the fact that the child actors don’t feel genuine, the director has a way too austere approach to an unbelievable story, or that there isn’t any suspense at all, but eventually, all boils down to the mixture of horror, drama, romance, and coming-of-age story that just doesn’t work. For example, one scene shows a man brutally slaughtering another man, and the next shows the flirtation of two kids. But that alone wouldn’t have ruined the movie for me it’s a handful of plainly ridiculous scenes that made it impossible for me to take Let the Right One In seriously. In one, a woman gets attacked by a dozen cats in a Scary Movie manner, in another one, the same woman ignites herself in a hospital bed, and what we also get to see are the bare nether regions of a twelve-year-old girl a scene that confirms her previous comment, she isn’t a girl. Oh, and the best is yet to come: a close-up shot of a man who’s burned his face with acid! Think of it like The Dar Knight’s Two-Face with worse prosthetics.

If there aren’t any of such idiotic moments, time is bypassed with boring dialogs, which accumulate to a sheerly unendurable sum over the course of almost two hours running time. All of this is disappointing, considering the potential some rare scenes show as in the one, in which protagonist Oskar visits his divorced father and the lovely father-son-ambiance suddenly leaves as a buddy of his father stops by and leads him away from the offspring and to alcohol. This particular scene is short and mostly silent, but still probably the best of the film because it for once manages to emotionally affect the audience.

The overall product though, is really disappointing. You can’t accuse Let the Right One In of using clichés, but that alone doesn’t make a film original in this case, it only makes it to an unfrightening horror film, an unmoving romance, and a drama too ridiculous to take seriously.