Låt den rätte komma in (Let The Right One In)

What makes this great to me from a narrative standpoint is the limited perspective of the story. All the complex backstories and answers to various mysteries are left out because Oskar, our protagonist character, either wouldn't know or isn't curious. Although the novel sounds moving and interesting and a lot more complicated, all I can do it repeat my first reaction, that it was the right choice to leave that out of the film. Everybody likes a good mystery, and everybody likes a rich lived-in world with its own sense of history, mythology, and character, but I think people are happiest when the edges remain unexplored. It gives you a sense that there's more out there. It's why the first Matrix movie is a thousand times better than the following two (and I'm, to a degree, a bit of an apologist for series like those). It's why the first Star Wars, and to a lesser degree the entire first trilogy, will always outpace the later films/trilogy in people's imaginations. Or Alien, or Blade Runner, or Indiana Jones, or THX 1138 (Lucas was on a roll early in his career; it's a crucial lesson I rather think he's forgotten). If you pull me into your world and make me believe it is rational, follows its own consistent but unique logic, but you tease me with a world beyond the borders of each frame that feels just as consistent and rational, you will have won my heart.

The other thing handled so well here is of course the actual tone and style of the film itself. The cinematography is beautiful in a way I'd call "slow," or at least "patient." Glacial, maybe, which suits the region and definitely seems like the contemporary Scandinavian style, if Aki Kaurismäki is any indicator. (I'm also reminded of the Icelandic Noi Albinoi and Roy Andersson's awesome films.)

Tight close-ups remind us that our perspective is limited, that the story is about the small characters in the big world who can only see so far. Action scenes tend to be fast and just barely off-frame (like the pool confrontation and Lacke's death in Eli's bathroom) or in extremely wide shots (like the attacks on Virginia and Jocke); in both cases the camera hovers impassive, lingering at the scene but nonchalant, almost as if capturing the drama by accident. This keeps the violence from us in a way that transforms terror into dread and panic into fear, and it keeps the plot at arm's length, because Let The Right One In is not a movie about its plot. It's not about what happens next. It's only ever about young Oskar, and how he relates to the confounding object of his affections, Eli. It's about character and mood, and not plot. (That's a far cry from saying it doesn't have a plot, obviously; it just keeps the plot in the background, slightly out of focus.) And every shot in the film says this. You cannot forget or mistake the focus of this story, and because the story is so fascinating in its simplicity and because Oskar and Eli are such charismatic, complicated and well-drawn characters, this is exactly the right approach. Wonderful, inspiring, and worth the revisit.

Låt den rätte komma in (Let The Right One In)

On a personal note, I've been moping around the house for two days sick now, missing work, missing everything, and this is the first movie I've managed to put on and sit through. I'd never seen it. I kept putting it off. I'm toying with a new idea that's kind of horror/thrillery but involves only children, and I figured, now was the time to stop putting off the "best vampire movie ever."

So it could be that I'm still sick, but I'm kind of at a loss as to what to say about it. I went in curious but resistant (hype has that effect) and I came out in love. The tone of the story and the events in the story were perfect: this is a movie about being lonely and scared and 11 years old. This movie has no right being remade in America, where depicting things like child sexuality and innocent violence are all-but-illegal. Especially that first one. We're an uptight culture. Thank god Sweden isn't. (As a product of my own uptight culture, I am struggling with the impulse to apologize for how lascivious that sounds; it isn't meant that way. It's meant in the tone of the film, and nothing more. Look how damaging and oppressive our culture is: I can't even discuss it openly.)

Speaking of discussing it openly, my biggest questions from the story were the relationship between Håkan and Eli, and the whole scarred-crotch thing. The latter I mistook for a shot of ordinary prepubescent girl's bits that happened to have some kind of scar above it, and apparently my mind is dark enough for that to suggest some kind of rape or tearing-open before she became a vampire, some kind of brutal history. As to the former, I was guessing Håkan was a lover (or maybe even her unchanged brother) who'd aged while she hadn't. Wikipedia sheds light on both mysteries for me. Håkan was indeed a pervert and would-be lover, though this was (rightly, I think) left more ambiguous in the film. Likewise, the novel says Eli is in fact a castrated androgynous boy, so I wasn't taking the claims of "I'm not a girl" seriously enough it seems. (I thought she meant, "I'm not a little girl; I'm a kind of inhuman monster.") That, too, was left open in the film, and again I think rightly so.

The perspective-character is Oskar; he didn't know anything about her pedophile helper, any more than he knew the origins of her as a vampire or why she would have a scarred, junkless crotch. So why should we?

I can't think of any complaints about this film, at all, except that the delicate tone this gets right will be exactly the first thing thrown out when Hollywood gets through with it. And I quote, "Producer Simon Oakes has made it clear that the plot of [the retitled remake] Let Me In will closely resemble that of the original film, except that it will be made 'very accessible to a wider audience'." Emphasis mine, and you can be sure what that means.

Oh well.

(This post, notably longer. I just missed blogging, is all, so I wrote more. It's my blog. Deal with it.)