Let The Right One In (2008)
Kare Hedebrant
Lina Leandersson
written by John Ajvide Lindqvist
directed by Tomas Alfredson
A story about a twelve year old boy who becomes friends with a same-aged girl, who is also a vampire. I’ve probably lost some of you already. This isn’t Romeo and Juliet with fangs. There is no scare factor or a light-heartedness of the familiar and currently overused monster theme. Instead of shock value the movie goes for a more subtle frightening idea of a bullied twelve year old boy living in a violent world where the adults are helpless, perhaps even unwilling. When the boy tells the girl how some of his classmates cut his cheek, she tells him to “hit harder than you dare, and they’ll stop.”
Of course, brutal is easy. It’s much more interesting to see believable intimacy that precedes the brutality. If you don’t care for the characters and the actors’ performances then nothing really matters and the movie fails.
If you saw the movie before its home release, then you probably know that Magnet fucked up the DVD and Blu-ray versions by not using the theatrical subtitles and instead going with an inferior translation. A stellar look, that contains screenshot comparisons, can be found at Icons of Fright.
So up until last week I’ve been waiting for a rerelease, and while it has been out, the only way to distinguish the new from the old is the “theatrical subtitles” on the back. Unwilling to hunt this down in stores – since Magnet doesn’t have an exchange program for people they assfucked with the inferior subtitles – I ordered the UK’s blu-ray version which has the theatrical subs and is region-free. If you need to own a version, the UK is the way to go – though I’m not sure if the UK DVD is region-free.
And now I’m going to babble so SPOILERS AHEAD FOR THE REST OF THIS POST.
-the scene that follows Eli bleeding out. Oskar says “who are you”, and she replies with a camera cut to her saying “I’m like you”, her face still all bloody and holy shit that’s goddamn creepy.
-or that scene where Oskar’s father’s friend comes over. Jesus, the hell was that scene about? Cuz that dude looked all sorts of wrong.
-or that scene where Eli rings the doorbell. She’s all cleaned up and then Oskar – at this point overly self-confident – starts taunting her. The expression on her face when he taps on the imaginary wall; her looking down at his finger and then up at his eyes. Kills me every time.
”But there’s three of them.”
“Then hit back harder.”
-or the scene where Eli is twisting the Rubik’s cube. You can hear her hissing and mumbling to herself. Even when Oskar says bye, she’s still preoccupied with the puzzle.
-or that same scene, Oskar says “you smell funny”; her expression – she arches her brow and gives a slight smile before going back to the puzzle.
-one day soon I’m gonna tell the moon about the crying game
-or how about that tracking shot when Conny and the other bullies enter the swimming pool area
-or that shot of Eli after pulling Oskar from underwater. We only see her eyes and part of her nose, but it’s a perfect shot because the last time we saw her, the lower half of her face was covered in blood. If we saw her entire face – and most likely bloody face – in the swimming pool scene, it would’ve been repetitive. Besides, the image of a relatively clean face as her final shot ends on an intimate note as opposed to ending hers with a bloodied image. Sure the pool scene closes with the massacre, but the close-up shot of the girl’s eyes and smile is much more powerful than the gore. It’s the person responsible for the horror and her reason for the violence that turns the movie into something intimate instead of a movie going for shock value.
-or the deliberate shot of Martin’s sneakers (the kid who tricks Oskar into coming back to the school). What’s so special about those sneakers? And then later in the scene we see those same sneaks kicking in the pool as Eli murders the heck out of him.
-or how about that scene…oh hell, at this point I might as well start from the beginning. Ok, so how about that scene right after the opening credits where….
There are a couple shots where it’s clear that the actress on the screen is not Lina Leandersson (her slurping up Oskar’s blood, her sitting on the tree, “be me for a little while”). In the book, there is a bit where Oskar says something like “and for a second she looked like an older girl.”
What a fantastic movie.
