While I've normally kept this blog to comics only, and believe me, its been hard to do when Doctor Who or Torchwood kick out an especially good episode, but until now i've stuck to my guns. Well, I will break my promise today after watching Let The Right One In, a swedish vampire story that is so well done and on so many levels that i know I'll be thinking about it for days, if not weeks.It is, I hate to say it, the epitome of Non-American Filmmaking (NAF): it respects your intelligence by not handing you everything on a silver platter, letting the relationships grow between the characters, and even ending in a way the could be taken in multiple directions, depending upon how you wish to read the film. It deals with all sorts of things that Hollywood would never touch: kid on kid violence, and pre-teen sexuality to name just two.
And it doesn't try to subvert the genre in a "Scream" way either. It uses vampire lore to tell a story, not to tell a vampire story. In this film, the vampire isn't the monster. Instead, it is the adults and they way they ignore the protagonist Oskar (Kare Hedebrant) that make them the biggest monsters of all. Oskar's new neighbor, Eli (Lina Leandersson), just happens to live off of blood, but she is neither the monster nor the innocent. She just is who she is. And things go from there.
I found myself incredibly impressed with the economy of storytelling in the shots on the movie, and the creative and effective way that they delivered the details of the story. While not a master class in directing, this may be my favorite vampire movie of all time. Go rent it. Now.
