Let The Right One In

Far from the aristocratic castles of Transylvania, in a grey, gritty, working-class suburb of Stockholm, Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant), a young loner who is bullied at school, thinks he’s met a kindred spirit when a new girl moves into his apartment block. But Eli (Lena Leandersson) is not all that she appears – she’s not even, she keeps telling him, really a girl. Tomas Alfredson coaxes a pair of remarkable performances out of his child leads, though the adults deserve plaudits, too, in particular Per Ragnar as Eli’s loyal companion, who spends his evenings collecting blood for her in monstrous fashion, but whose own tragedy becomes clearer as the plot unfolds. 

 

That plot, meanwhile, regularly subverts the narrative expectations of a standard horror tale, tearing our sympathies between the unsuspecting victims of vampirism, and those who willingly become party to it. The final reel will leave you shocked, then elated, then deeply uneasy. Make sure to give yourself a few hours to recover afterwards.