I must write this blog for one reason and one reason only: it legitimately allows me a creative space to use the phrase “spontaneous combustion”.
Kai asked to join me for another Life in Colour movie-evening. Last time we watched Pan’s Labyrinth. This time we watched Let the Right One In (2008). So what I’m telling you is we really understand romance.
This film centers around two characters: Oskar & Eli. One of them is a vampire.
I genuinely attempted a first draft of this blog not revealing this painfully obvious spoiler except the piece read like a slightly disturbing Mad Libs – “the character can only survive by consuming human ______ {red-colored bodily fluid}”.
This vampire story begins on a fateful, snowy night in the center of a Swedish apartment complex, on a playground. (You’ll get used to the snow. Trust me). This is the place where Oskar and Eli meet.
Oskar is a poster-child of the Aryan race but behind his blond-hair, blue-eyed, 100 SPF skin tone is a meek, friendless boy / mini-serial killer in the making.
Oskar is also 100% human. So, you guessed it; Eli is our story’s vampire. In almost every single way, she is Oskar’s opposite – olive skin tone, piercing dark eyes and jet black hair guises a being who reacts to almost all situations in a very visceral way.
Let’s pause to take a real quick quiz. I realize you probably haven’t seen the movie before yet I feel like you still got this.
The character Eli has to move constantly because:
a.) Her father is in the military
b.) She’s a free-spirit
or c.) She kills townspeople as her food source and can’t stay in one location too long in order to avoid getting captured.
How'd you do?
Eli and a middle-aged man who at first glance would pass as Eli’s father have moved into the same apartment block as Oskar. Whatever the relationship between Eli and this older gentleman may be, we quickly learn about his peculiar extra-curricular activities (think: Jack the Ripper).
As the movie progresses and Eli & Oskar grow closer, it almost seems that this mysterious man grows increasingly disheveled. Don’t let that inverse relationship fool you though; Oskar and this man have much more in common than first meets the eye… but if I’m being honest, I’m not sure I would have caught that had I watched the movie solo. Kai caught it then filled me in.
I don’t have a lot of pride but enough that I don’t want to admit that again.
So, yes, Kai had to connect some dots for me but everything truly came full circle when during my typical post-movie research I learned Let the Right One In is adapted from a novel by the same name. You can watch this movie without concern for the book and instead take this film at face-value to be another vampire flix. In this way, you’ll appreciate how Director Tomas Alfredson and writer John Ajvide Lindqvist cinematically adhere to some basic vampire mythology, such as:
vampires can’t be exposed to sunlight or else…
At last, the moment I've been waiting for
Vampires can’t enter a home without first being invited or else…
Vampires can’t be around CGI-cats or else…
Wait, what? This was new folklore for me. I wasn’t aware my St. Paul apartment had its own resident vampire-killer.
Ferocious looking, isn’t she?
But if you want more of a challenge out of your Panasonic, try and identity the character complexities driven by the novel which are touched on subtly (but not obscurely!) across the film’s 1 hr. 54 min run time. Let the Right One In is refreshingly free of unnecessary dialogue, however. This means you’ll need to pick up on all the discrete clues hidden in the unobtrusive camera shots and scenery to truly understand this film’s significance.
If that seems overwhelming, here’s some guidance: Eli battles with identity issues and in more ways than one. Look for additional meaning in the question she asks Oskar:
“Would you still like me if I wasn’t a girl?”
Let the Right One In does dance with the idea of vampire romance but not in the heterosexual and exploitative way that Hollywood has perpetuated long before “Team Edward / Team Jacob” t-shirts made their hellish appearance on our planet.
“Real love is to offer your life at the feet of another, and that’s what people today are incapable of. ”
It’s a cycle of codependency rather than lust that brings the two morbidly unhappy characters of Eli and Oskar together. Whether Eli is a blessing or a curse upon Oskar, however, is up to you to decide.
Overall, I was excited to watch this film hoping it’d get the taste left behind by Stephenie Meyer of white-washed, glittery vampires out of my mouth but I didn't necessarily love LTROI. Don’t take just my word for it though – take Kai’s.