What a joy to find a film like this on a rainy Friday afternoon. Whilst the queue's for 'Fast and Furious' disappeared around the corner, I crept past with a few others to experience a Swedish vampire horror, which turns out to be pretty much the best thing out this year. 'Let The Right One In', directed by Tomas Alfredson, is a fantastical take on the vampire genre with a gloriously grisly edge.
Oskar is a quiet and unhappy boy living with his mother in a block of flats somewhere on the edge of Stockholm. One night, he sees an old man and a young girl arrive in a taxi and move into the flat next door. This is Eli, an equally quiet and distant child. The two of them strike up a kind of friendship, mostly carried on in the frozen courtyard in front of the flats late at night.
It's not long before a series of terrible murders begin to take place and we soon discover the reason. Eli is a vampire and the old man is her protector not her father, and is the serial killer who is supplying her with blood.
At school, Oskar faces a gang of bullies who delight in picking on him in increasingly cruel ways. His frustration and sense of inadequacy builds to the point where he wants top do something about it, and his friendship with Eli gives him the courage to try.
The film is shot beautifully and the performances are intentionally downbeat. But that makes the impact of the story altogether more powerful. There's fear, there's surprise and there's the unexpected, all in buckets. It's a cracker, the best thing I've seen in a long while. I only wish I could have caught the director speaking in London on Monday.
