Film

Sex and Death and Rubik's Cubes

Let the Right One In Speaks the International Language of Vampire

by Paul Constant

LET THE RIGHT ONE IN Are you shitting yourself yet?

In certain movie theaters, you'll see a short ad before the film that repeats, in about a dozen different languages, "The language of film is universal." It's just the kind of pabulum that Seattle movie audiences love to hear—that somehow, by sitting and watching a subtitle movie, you're contributing to the cause of global understanding and, eventually, world peace. But anyone who's seen the dregs of SIFF, the Tunisian epics that were filmed for the equivalent of 50 American dollars, understands that not all international film is universal. Plenty of Israeli family dramas and Swedish coming-of-age films have passages whose inclusions flummox American audiences. There's a much more specific language of film that's universal: the genre film.

Let the Right One In is a recent Swedish movie that often feels as though it could have been filmed in America. Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant) is a 12-year-old boy who has been ostracized from just about everyone in his school. His quiet disposition, and his tendencies to take out a knife and violently attack his imaginary attackers at night, suggest that he's just the kind of boy who's all too familiar to American audiences: the quiet one who just snapped one day for no particular reason. But aspects of the film—in particular the cinematography, in which characters and actions are often shot from an alarming distance in order to capture more of that slightly askew Scandinavian light, and the behaviors, in which characters keep a respectful and entirely un-American arm's length from other people's business—can seem downright alien to us.

It's a comfort, then, to American audiences when a brutal murder happens early in the film. And though it's not filmed in gory CSI-style close-up, and though the camera keeps a polite Swedish distance from the crime, Right One's primary language becomes that of genre. Once Oskar befriends Eli (Lina Leandersson, giving the kind of nuanced, intense performance that should make American child actors shit themselves with envy), a 12-year-old girl the viewer almost immediately recognizes is a vampire, we become comfortable with that primary language, and we can watch with a kind of comfort that other foreign films don't command.

What does everyone around the world know about vampires who star in movies? They require human blood in order to survive. Sunlight kills them. They are prone to brooding and also to unfortunate romance. Most of them can't enter a house without being invited. As Eli befriends Oskar, and her attention transforms him from a loner to a young man flush with the first pulses of love, we know what's coming: Death is sure to follow.

But because we've been hypnotized by the pretense of genre, Right One has enough wiggle room to play with our expectations without seeming off-puttingly foreign. For a while, it seems as though the movie is a gothic adaptation of E.T., with vampires in place of aliens and a Rubik's Cube as the method of seduction instead of Reese's Pieces. But as Oskar and Eli's relationship progresses, and as our genre-comforted sense of expectation is quietly turned on its head, we don't know what to make of things anymore. It's impossible to choose the good guys from the bad guys, and you wind up rooting for something horrible to happen.

This isn't some Shyamalan-esque twist-fest, but to talk too directly about the specifics of Right One would rob it of some of its inspiration, and therefore some of its charm, which means I have to be vague. But there hasn't been an American genre film this good in quite some time. By taking nothing about the vampire legend for granted, and by leaving great swaths of mysteries unsolved, Right One can become a film about all kinds of things: the weird sexuality of burgeoning adolescents, how anger and violence can sometimes be a perfectly reasonable response in the proper situation, and how love is always completely, seriously fucked-up.

Maybe the best part of Right One is that it doesn't answer all of its questions: It doesn't seem as though anyone, on leaving the movie, watched the same film as anyone else in the theater. And yet it somehow manages to resolve all its promises of genre: It tells a complete and satisfying vampire story, maybe one of the best vampire stories put to film since Murnau's Nosferatu, and still manages to tell us something absolutely new in a language that we thought we completely understood.