Lost in the drift.
halo-17 seems to have died, or at least the film portion of it has. This has been some time coming, and it seems that one of the reviews I submitted way back when is forever stuck in the shuffle. So, I give it to you now, my unpublished longform writeup of Let the Right One In:
It’s a bitter cold that envelops the Swedish suburb of Blackeberg, the kind of wintry chill that seeps into your joints and your bones no matter how many layers of clothing you pile onto yourself. Snow and ice cover the ground and the bare ash-gray trees, creating a monochromatic color scheme that emphasizes the sterility of the surrounding architecture all the more. The pale Nordic countenances that populate Blackeberg become nearly translucent in the meager winter light, the stinging rosiness of their cheeks being the only thing separating the suburb’s inhabitants from corpses on ice. In the face of this, the residents move with deliberation, huddling indoors and kept from complete torpor more often than not by the hazy warm glow of alcohol.
Such an environment would seem to foster visitations by the Grim Reaper. And so it does in Tomas Alfredsen’s Let the Right One In, an uneven horror film that nonetheless has an uncanny understanding of the atmosphere of dread. Death does come to Blackeberg, not in the form of frostbite, but rather in the form of Eli (Lina Leandersson), an androgynous-looking twelve-year-old whom by admission has “been twelve for a long time.”
Oskar (Kare Hedebrant) is the first to meet this new face in town. He is also twelve, reticent, frail-looking, bullied at school by a smirking thug who looks like a reform-school version of Matthieu Amalric. His is a lonesome life, so he finds himself compelled in all his adolescent hormonal confusion towards this strange kid who neither threatens nor ignores him. Eli, too, is drawn to Oskar; this new friendship, though, comes with its own peculiar complications. Eli, you see, is a vampire, one who has been feeding on stray members of the community with the bumbling help of an older man by the name of Hakan (Per Ragnar).
I feel I should like this more than I do, and the treatment of Hakan’s sub-narrative is one reason I don’t. There’s a lot of ground Alfredsen and screenwriter John Ajvide Lindqvist wishe to cover with Let the Right One In, stemming from its origins as a novel (also written by Lindqvist). The necessities of adaptation mean that each character and each subplot can only receive so much attention, and while the main business of the film - the relationship between Oskar and Eli - feels right and true, there’s a good portion of marginal and secondary material that comes off as undernourished. Hakan’s thread is the major manifestation of this - while I’m told that his significance in the novel is crucial, the film has him show up a couple of times as an inefficient patriarchal figure who can’t be trusted to harvest bodies for Eli (he’s shown twice botching a kill and succeeding never), and his ultimate function is as just another body for the tally. A concurrent thread involving stuporous roughneck Erik (Henrik Dahl) fares somewhat better but still leaves its central character as a granite-hewed cipher.
In the wake of the narrative deficiencies, Alfredsen offers as compensation a palpable ambiance of death. While a couple of the more action-oriented scenes (notably an attack by felines, marred by awful CGI, that ranks as one of the worst things I’ve seen in a film this year) are regrettable, the film as a whole is chillingly lovely in its poetic comportment. The chilly setting lends itself mightily to a deliberate style of direction, one that emphasizes silence and stillness above flash and thunder. Alfredsen’s compositions are generally satisfying, with good use of empty white and heavy shadow (an early attack scene, where Eli pounces on a drunk like a feral animal, uses blackened negative space like few horror films in recent memory have); furthermore, the cutting seems timed just to where it needs to be at all times.
This stillness coupled with the frigid setting lends a constant doleful air to the film; though not on the level of Dreyer’s Vampyr or Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre, Let the Right One In is cut from the same cloth in that it forgoes the shock of lesser genre efforts for a genuine, disquieting sense of inevitable creeping death. People don’t just up and die - they cry, squirm, survive past hope, howl in agony, twitch, bleed out. The story’s coldness is not just the coldness of the winter but the coldness of the grave, and the acts of violence in this film, even Oskar’s revenge on his tormentor, are haunted and painful.
It is also, lest I forget, a love story. The hybrid shouldn’t work, but it does: The sense of the inescapable, that nothing will be totally okay, makes the cusp-of-puberty infatuation feel even more urgent than it would under normal l’amour fou conditions. Alfredsen’s patient filmmaking is at its best here, and he’s matched by his leads, both of whom are stellar in difficult roles. Hedebrant gives Oskar a meek relatable aspect without tipping the character into a nebbish or emo-boy; he nails the chaos and confusion of being an unpopular adolescent and doesn’t stint on the simmering rage beneath the surface of the bullied exterior. Leandersson’s role is even tougher - she has to make Eli appealing yet unsettling, open yet inscrutable, able to read as of her outward age or of her “true” age whatever the situation may call for. Not a wrong step, not a hitch can be found in her performance, and it’s worth watching the entire thing just for the rainbow of conflicting emotions that passes across her face in the brief moment before Eli, at Oskar’s behest, steps through a doorway without being invited.
What’s important, what results in much of the success that can be credited to the film, is due to the chemistry and talent between Hedebrant and Leandersson and how their work meshes with Alfredsen’s direction. It works as a tender tweenage love story. It works, to a certain extent, as a horror film. It also works, to a certain extent, as a baleful metaphorical narrative about a young man coming to terms with the idea that he, like the rest of us, will some day die. So I wish this film was better. I wish the non-child-centric parts were more focused. I wish it didn’t have the brief bursts of terrible CGI. But at the end of the day, I’ll still take it even with its warts.
