Let the Right One In

Based on the bestselling novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist, director Tomas Alfredson's chilly vampire flick set in wintry Stockholm paradoxically offers a surprising degree of warmth in its central story about a pair of 12-year-old misfits. Thin, pale, and dour Oskar (Kare Hedebrant), who lives in a dingy apartment complex, is regularly bullied by his classmates. But Oskar is befriended by his new next door neighbor Eli (Lina Leandersson), a peculiar girl (apparently unaffected by frigid temperatures) whose arrival coincides with an outbreak of murders in which the victims are drained of blood. The twin narrative strands of the plot revolve around Eli's guardian Hakan's (Per Ragnar) efforts to obtain nutrition for the girl, and Oskar's struggles to confront his demons, with both threads converging in a pair of brilliantly executed, genuinely unsettling sequences—the first involving a curious neighbor who winds up in Eli's inner sanctum, and the second at the school swimming pool where Oskar's enemies gang up on him. Let the Right One In boasts an engrossing blend of suspense, horror, puppy-love, and splashes of poetic gore, as it serves up imaginative twists on an old genre. Highly recommended. [Note: DVD extras include an eight-minute behind-the-scenes featurette, six minutes of deleted scenes, a photo gallery, and trailers. Bottom line: a small but solid extras package for an excellent chiller.] (F. Swietek)