everyday. periphery.

When I saw the trailer for this movie I thought: this is a pretty neat idea. A girl of twelve years is presented as one of the epitomes of sin: a vampire, even worse, a dirty vampire, who licks bloods from the floor of a crappy room. Whose blood is it? The blod of an angel: a blonde, young, Swedish boy with blue eyes and a slight nose trickle. This is the constellation that is being developed in Let the right one in: a vampire girl who looks like she might have a migrant background and a local boy whose life and character are more complex than one would expect from his face – complex even before the arrival of Evi, the creature who drinks the blood of human beings. The film is moving in a very slow pace. Long takes show the faces of the protagonists. They show the places they live in. They show their interactions. Set in a gloomy winter atmosphere, the really well-cast, charming and at the same time frightening characters encounter each other: talking, bullying, playing and killing their way through night and day. The film succeeds at giving almost all characters more depth than one would expect in a horror or vampire flick. It is definitely more than a simple genre movie. It allows one to identify with all of these different characters and their problems – both small and mind-blowingly huge problems. This movie got me really involved, charmed, amused, shocked, frightened, and all of the time deeply engaged. It is a love story that tells us about how we can loose our innocence while maintaining it. About how we maintain our innocence by giving it up. You should definitely go and see it – if you can cope with the spilling of blood and some disturbing juxtapositions that this movie is not afraid of showing. In its heart, it is a very tender love story.
IMDb entry | Official Homepage / Trailer