Let the Right One In (2008)
Directed by Tomas Alfredson
When Oskar, a sensitive, bullied 12-year-old boy, meets his new neighbor, the mysterious and moody Eli, they strike up a friendship. Initially reserved with each other, Oskar and Eli slowly form a close bond, but it soon becomes apparent that she is no ordinary young girl.
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17 films that influenced Let the Right One In
What critics say influenced Let the Right One In
Before that, you have to go all the way back to George A. Romero's 1977 Martin for anything approaching a good vampire movie.
Like George A. Romero's horror classic Martin (1977), this Swedish shocker mixes vampire mythology with adolescent melancholy, and just as the earlier film was rooted in reality by its run-down Pittsburgh locations, this one draws heavily on its working-class setting, a drab suburb of Stockholm.
Though the character of Eli has a film history as far back as Lambert Hillyer’s 1936 classic Dracula’s Daughter and Mario Bava’s Black Sunday , Alfredson’s film is less interested in femininity than it is in childhood perceptions of gender.
It's a moody and moving coming-of-age saga, a love story, a wish-fulfillment revenge fantasy and a convincing depiction of a depressed milieu (working-class suburban Stockholm in the 1980s) as well as a vampire movie worthy of being discussed alongside such other offbeat genre touchstones as George Romero's "Martin" (1977) and the still unsurpassed "Vampyr" (1932), also from a Scandinavian filmmaker, Denmark's Carl Dreyer.
Though the character of Eli has a film history as far back as Lambert Hillyer’s 1936 classic Dracula’s Daughter and Mario Bava’s Black Sunday , Alfredson’s film is less interested in femininity than it is in childhood perceptions of gender.
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It takes vampires as seriously as the versions of " Nosferatu " by Murnau and Herzog do, and that is very seriously indeed.
[Rating: 3.5 out of 5] Let Me In (Matt Reeves, 2010) Let the Right One In gets something of a tonal inversion in the remake Let Me In, a triumph of imaginative, intelligent adaptation and breathtakingly assured direction; it joins Werner Herzog's Nosferatu and David Cronenberg's The Fly as one of the greatest horror movie remakes.
Vampire movies go back at least as far as the 1922 classic "Nosferatu," so it is not easy to come up with an unexpected twist.
Let the Right One In may be the most lyrical vampire fable since Werner Herzog's 1979 remake of Nosferatu, but it's still got genre in its blood.
Indeed, this is a horror film—and make no mistake, it is a horror film and an R-rated one at that—that edges its way into the realm of dark fantasy à la Guillermo Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth (2006).
Like "Pan's Labyrinth," it's a children's horror film for adults.
Director Tomas Alfredson, working from John Ajvide Lindqvist's novel and screenplay, shoots all of the above as a quiet drama with a muted score -- an approach that unsettles the viewer's mind much as Kubrick's overly composed interiors did in "The Shining."
A heavily-favored selection at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In announces the most promising talents to emerge from Sweden since Lukas Moodysson debuted Show Me Love almost a decade ago.
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Made in Sweden, this oddball teen love fable plays out like Twilight meets My Bodyguard as directed by Ingmar Bergman.
For all its swooning, fang-baring romance, "Twilight" basically hits the same notes as every teen movie going back to "Rebel Without A Cause," as a good girl meets a bad (but not that bad) boy trying to keep his sinister urges in check for the sake of true love.