Can a 12-year-old boy from the Stockholm suburbs find true happiness with an immigrant from the land of the undead? Only if he can manage to let the right one slip in.

U.S. Film Festival Release: Tribeca Film Festival, April 2008

Original Title: Låt den rätte komma in (Swedish with English subtitles)

"Anyone who doesn't like this film I think is...an evil person!" laughed John Ajvide Lindqvist, writer of the novel and screenplay for “Let the Right One In,” at the April 26 Tribeca Film Festival screening.

The audience laughed along, but we’d been duly warned.

Directed by Tomas Alfredson (“Four Shades of Brown”), this Swedish coming-of-age love story follows the exploits of 12-year-old Oskar (Kare Hedebrant) as he struggles to maintain his equilibrium as the victim of schoolyard bullies in his small Stockholm suburb.

When Oskar decides to let the right one in, he must invite her in: She is his neighbor Eli (Lina Leandersson), a wistful 12-year-old vampire.

Oskar and Eli, A Vampire Love Story

“I must be gone and live or stay and die,” Eli leaves in a note to Oskar as she struggles to master her impulses, at least vis-à-vis Oskar.

The movie’s most arresting moments take place between the nascent couple as their friendship drifts awake, like something being transmitted photosynthetically across the carapace of the courtyard snow.

Although on the face of things, Eli is a graver danger to Oskar than any boy at school, he is fearless around her, and in the manner of children they test each other, bravely, gently and seriously, and they pass each other’s tests.

When she kisses him for the first time, her lips still red and overrun from a fresh feed, and he returns that kiss, we feel that something unprecedented has come into the world; not just the world of cinema, but the world.

The Ghostly Beauty of Suburban Stockholm

Alfredson’s vision, as realized by cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, is of a world that is beautiful even in its pain. The winter trees shiver with ice crystals, the blood of the murdered gleams against high white piles of snow, and even the rather mundane apartment buildings in which the quotidien yearnings and misunderstandings of the village are played out, lean softly against the night sky, proud in their symmetry.

In one of the movie’s many breathtaking scenes, Oskar and Eli meet in the common courtyard of their building, his white-blond hair merging with landscape as he fumbles with a Rubik’s cube, one that is geometrically in play with the steel jungle gym-like structure whose top level Eli is sitting upon, her skin the palest pale, her eyes as blue as the sky just before sunset.

As we watch – although Oskar misses it – Eli jumps/glides/flies down from the third level of her steel cubic structure in a move so stunningly graceful that, at first, we can’t be sure whether it’s possible for any creature heavier than a butterfly to alight as she does in the snow.

Small Moments in “Let the Right One In”

For all its unearthly beauty and scenes of horror, the film also makes room for moments of lightness – “Thanks for another evening steeped in friendship and merriment!” one of the character’s salutes his friends after a night of heavy drinking – and of high camp.

There are two unapologetically campy scenes, one involving a houseful of suddenly feral cats who leap upon a new and still bemused vampire (shades of Stephen King’s “Sleepwalkers”!) and the other a hospital bed resultantly occupied by the same vampire, who bursts into unexpected ceiling-shooting flames when sunlight strikes her.

The filmmakers admitted after the screening that the cat scene was a reason to introduce a real-life eccentric friend and cat lover into the movie; how exactly the hospital scene was shot they demurred from discussing.

Morrissey’s Song, “Let the Right One In”

Lindqvist notes that he got the title for the novel and the movie from the Morrissey song of the same name:

• Let the right one in
• Let the old dreams die
• Let the wrong ones go
• They cannot
• They cannot
• They cannot do what you want them to do, oh
• Ah, let the right one slip in
• Slip in
• Slip in
• And when at last it does
• I’d say you were within your rights to bite
• The right one and say, what kept you so long?
• What kept you so long ?