Due to having been snowed into my house for the best part of five days it proved impossible to actually get to the cinema. Now the roads are less treacherous, I’ve chosen to save my hard-earned to watch Gareth Edwards' Monsters this weekend having raved about his artistic achievement to everybody I know ever since I first read about it.
Alas, bloodsuckers- all is not lost! A brilliant person was kind enough to lend me Tomas Alfredson's original, which- I was happy to find- beautifully subverts the pin-up romanticism of the modern vampire genre.
Let the Right One In follows Oscar, a shy twelve year-old who suffers regularly at the mercy of the school bully. One night he meets Eli, twelve, who has just moved in next-door. She is a vampire and her "father" subsidises her bloodlust by murdering local boys and men. Oscar falls in love with Eli, but the discovery of her terrible secret only cements his conviction that he is no longer alone in the world.
John Lindqvist’s screenplay (adapted from his own novel) broods quietly as Oscar and Eli change from resentful loners to inseparable dependents. Love is neither a crush nor an over-wrought battle of minds but a reciprocal loneliness; an aching, understated sadness. The violence, often strong, is not mere spectacle but a reflection of the brutal necessity of Eli’s survival.
The cinematography is beautiful, depicting a shadowy snow-covered mid-Scandinavia in which boxy, functional apartment blocks sit awkwardly in the darkness; pristine flat-packed interiors ghostlike in the rare, oppressive daylight. Most of the film plays at night, owing to Eli’s aversion to the sun.
Subtlety is key. These characters make realistic, logical decisions but not obvious decisions. Love is not communicated by a kiss but a touch of the hand. A vampire is not a sexy, brooding human bat, but a miserable being, ashamed of its condition.
In a dark, forbidding environment in which men huddle together and drink whiskey and women sit alone watching television all evening, there is little parental love. The only sympathetic adult is Eli's "father", who murders out of love then takes his own life out of shame. He is not a 'murderer', but he has to keep Eli alive. He has conditioned himself not to care.
And this is true with Eli: she has conditioned herself to survive, long past being sympathetic to herself. Lina Leandersson's performance is understated and affecting. Kare Hedebrant as Oscar is reminiscent of Danny Lloyd in The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980); little expression but lots of subtext. Again, we have a character who has conditioned themself to deal with loneliness. A lot of credit has to go to Tomas Alfredson for his direction of children.
The theme of gender is tactfully debated, with Oscar branded 'a girl' by his tormentors and Eli's self description "I'm not a girl, I'm nothing", a single shot suggestive to several explanations (confirmed, however, by the novel). But sexuality is not important here so much as love, and at twelve years old a physical relationship is not expected to progress.
The remake Let Me In has been described by Empire as "a movie that will stand on its own and satisfy fans of the original". I'll be very happy to see Reeve's take on the story, but Alfredson has set a very high bar with what is, in my opinion, one of the best movies to express the concept of the vampire ever made.
Following this weekend there will be a review of Monsters. I'm very excited about this one.
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