Let The Right One In Was Fantastic and Intimate

Luke Johansen
Aug 19, 2024
8 min read

Ever since my favorite video game as a high schooler became an obscure first-person shooter set in 1980s Sweden called Generation Zero, I've loved the country, its architecture, and its overall mood. I mean, for all of the game's structural flaws, it beautifully rendered the Eastern European nation and kind of made me fall in love with that region of the world the more and more I learned about it. And so I was kind of enamored with the setting of Tomas Alfredson's 2008 film "Let The Right One In." OK, I have to say that after finishing both versions of this film (the other one being Matt Reeves's Let Me In), the cold, hostile, mysterious, and yet warm and intimate mood of the world they portray has to be one of my favorite things about cinema, like ever. Watching both of these movies just felt so surreal and really transported me to a different place. Ever since I watched The Batman for the first time, I've really loved when a movie takes the time to make you really, truly feel its world instead of just seeing it, and let me tell you, you feel the world that Let The Right One In is trying so hard to portray. Truly feeling the world of a movie is something that I thought I'd lost, and am glad to be able to say that I haven't yet. In addition, pretty much everything else about this film is also firing on all cylinders, and I'm very glad I took the time to watch it, even if it wasn't at the top of my list of priorities. I somehow loved this film even more than the American version (which I still love a lot), and though the stories they tell are drawn from virtually identical subject matter, which makes the narrative flows of both films pretty much the same, I noticed that they both have a distinct voice and vision of the similar worlds they are trying to portray, and this made them feel very distinct from each other, and yet so strikingly similar. In a lot of ways, writing this article is going to feel just as much like a remake of my article for Let Me In as Reeves's take is a remake of Tomas Alfredson's film. They're both legitimate, if very similar, perspectives on a really special story, and frankly, it's a story I'm blessed to be able to talk about twice on this blog. Let's get into this.

Let The Right One In, a 2008 film based on the 2004 novel of the same name, is a Swedish film set in 1982 that follows Oskar, a bullied and lonely boy who meets a mysterious girl(?) named Eli, who only comes out at night, and may or may not suck people's blood because she(?) may or may not be a vampire. Watch the trailer to find out.

I think that the horror genre is far too often a genre defined by excess. Directors and audiences are drawn to it by inappropriately macabre questions such as "How much blood can we spill?" "How uselessly long can we drag this tense scene out?" "How far can we take this on-screen violence without getting kicked out of mainstream theaters?" And so, I was pleasantly surprised to see that Let The Right One In didn't really do any of these things and was far less concerned with spectacle and far more concerned with emotional intimacy and honesty. Now, this movie more than earns its R rating, so don't think this is me saying that it's fine for younger audiences because it's not. What I'm saying here is that none of the violence that occurs on-screen is sensationalized or glamorized in any way. Let The Right One In is a very matter-of-fact and restrained piece, and it's more worried about contemplation of its human aspects than it is about entertainment through shock value, and I appreciate this restraint on its part. It's a hard watch at points, but this is due to the film's subject matter it is discussing rather than how it portrays that subject matter. This movie isn't loud or bombastic. It's a quiet and introspective tale, and I respect Tomas Alfredson for taking this approach and potentially risking losing a decent portion of his prospective audiences, although I don't know if Swedish attention spans are better than American ones (they probably are). Let The Right One In is a very grown-up and mature movie for people with very grown-up and mature sensibilities, and it doesn't pretend to be anything else. And I'm not saying that this film is mature in regards to the fact that the subject matter presented is inappropriate for younger audiences, although that would be true. I'm calling it mature because of how it chooses to view and portray everything we see here. Never is this film watered down or neutered in any way by studio demands to make it more accessible or, I guess, interesting to general audiences. It is what it wants to be, and unapologetically so. In a lot of ways, this movie feels like something that would be in a song by The Smiths, if you happen to be familiar with that band. On the surface, what you see (equivalent to what you hear) can be relatively innocent. It's two kids playing. But when you dig into what's actually going on (what the singer is actually saying, per se), the film can be really dark and emotionally mature, and sometimes, those dark undertones become dark overtones. But they're still just tones, and I respect Alfredson for taking this approach. I guess what I'm trying to ultimately get at here is that no one setpiece of Let The Right One In is ever really trying to get your attention, and the focus is always intimately set on Oskar and Eli. So you often end up feeling the world more than you actually see it, and boy, do you ever feel this world.

The next thing that Let The Right One In accomplishes well is digging into the mentalities of our characters in a really intimate way, which this film accomplishes by letting itself be quiet and introspective. This filmmaking trick is the literal equivalent of sitting down anywhere and literally just shutting up for however long. When you do that, you will hear things you wouldn't have if you were talking, and a similar rule applies to filmmaking. When a writer slows his or her movie down, they'll notice and address plot beats and ideas that no high-speed, high-tempo blockbuster can ever hope to even touch. Let The Right One In is a truly intimate story and really digs into the mentalities of Oskar and Eli in special ways that will probably resonate with people who have been bullied or have felt alone at points in their own lives. Assisting this emotional intimacy is absolutely incredible acting all across the board that never takes you out of the immersion of this film in any way. Heck, to bring it up again, in short, Let The Right One In is an unapologetically personal film, enough so that an American director named Matt Reeves decided to make his own version of this film specifically when he could have made his own version of any other film on the entire planet. That speaks volumes, but of course, I don't just want to appeal to authority here. Keeping the cast and the world of this film small gives Let The Right One In this special personality of intentional focus and moodiness that I don't find often in a film, and I know that it will probably be a little unfair to films I'll watch in the future, but I know that I will be unconsciously comparing any dark, character-driven drama I watch to this film because, in a lot of ways, it has set the benchmark for this specific corner of filmmaking, and frankly has reached the heights of any and all manner of character-driven dramas. If that's your thing, I think you'll probably love this film.

So, the atmosphere of Let The Right One In is appropriately moody and unsettlingly unnatural, yet weirdly and simultaneously grounded. Let me explain. While it may not be as polished or as slick as the 2010 version of the film, the visual aesthetic of Let The Right One In looks and feels otherworldly in a way that even Matt Reeves's version couldn't touch, despite this film's very down-to-earth setting. I think this has to do with the fact that a lot of shots in the Swedish version have a lot of shadow, despite ever-present and harsh fluorescent lighting in nighttime scenes. What I'm getting at is that this film is visually dark when it shouldn't be, and this is really super unsettling. Combine that with a setting that looks like some hotel complex out of a badly-made Soviet propaganda video, and you've got a truly immersive and one-of-a-kind visual aesthetic that feels so unsettling in a way I've never seen replicated, not even by Reeves's take (although that film did do a lot of really special things with its own atmosphere, specifically feeling like The Thing meets Cloverfield meets The Shining with vampires). But back to Let The Right One In, Swedish cinema, and the visual aspect of this film. Like I was saying, the harsh fluorescent lighting combined with the dark windows and the dark sky and the dark everything really gave this film an unapologetically harsh feeling, and it was simultaneously thrilling and unsettling to look at in all the right ways. The unreplicated, unrelenting, and unique sense of foreboding that this film achieved through its atmosphere should be something that horror films learn from, and it lets this film lean back on its mood rather than sacrifice its plot and narrative flow to try and give the audience a sense of fear. That fear is already there, and it's really gloriously subtle rather than unapologetically in-your-face and obvious.

Of course, the characters in this film are extremely well-written, but what really takes Let The Right One In to the next level is its pacing, which is, by and large, extremely good. Now, I found myself wishing that the climax of the film had hit with more force than it did, but maybe it just wasn't as impactful as it would have been otherwise given that I already knew what was going to happen due to having watched the American version of the film beforehand, and granted, the rest of the film was just phenomenal, and not even a climax of only-slightly lesser quality is going to affect that. Now, despite all my endorsing of this film, I do need to bring up the fact that Let The Right One In is an extremely dark and mature film, and likewise, it contains some mature content, including some full-frontal nudity that does show a boy who was castrated a long time ago (long story), as well as a little bit of strong language (subtitled, spoken in Swedish), and a good bit of really disturbing and sometimes-graphic violence that admittedly meshes well with the established tropes of this film. Additionally, some more liberal reviewers have tried to classify this film as a queer romance, and to be dead honest with you, I never really got much of a sense of that. I'm not going to delve into the thick and thin of that assertion, given that it would bring up spoilers, but I would definitely assert that trying to classify Let The Right One In as a queer romance would be dishonest and ultimately dishonor what the film is trying to do, comment on loneliness and isolation, by reducing it to a handful of politically correct talking points. All in all, both versions of this story, the Swedish one and the American one, are two of my favorite films of all time, and despite the heavy and mature subject matter in both, I would recommend them both to you, particularly the first one, which I have dedicated this article to. You'll rarely find another horror film or drama quite like it, be it a foreign film or otherwise. I found a little quote that I really like that I think applies to this film well, and I'd like to end this review for Let The Right One In with it: