A Friend In Need

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09/14/2010

A Friend In Need

Let The Right One In

Meet Cute

I finally got around to watching Tomas Alfredson's acclaimed vampire film Let The Right One In, and can unreservedly recommend it, as if that was news to anyone. It's the best vampire film I've ever seen, but that's not saying a whole not -- looking back, I can't recall seeing any vampire movies that I thought were particularly good, with the exception of F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu, which bored me when I watched it on VHS almost two decades ago, but which I don't feel fit to judge based on that viewing, and which has the pedigree of being an Important Silent Film directed by a major artist whose later Sunrise -- which I saw in film school and which was a sort of co-Best Picture winner with Wings at the first Academy Awards(about which more here) -- impressed me more.

It's hard to discuss the film at too much length without delving into spoiler territory; suffice it to say that Alfredson's film walks a razor-thin line between "heartwarming" and "extremely creepy." The relationship between A Boy And His Vampire seems, in its broad emotional strokes, to be downright sweet -- two misfits finding each other amid an adolescent wasteland of ruthless bullies, indifferent parents, and all that -- but this narrative is perpetually undercut by the filmmakers' relentless determination not to skip over the brutally violent nature of what a vampire is supposed to be. We find ourselves overwhelmingly inclined to view Eli, the vampire girl hauntingly played by Lina Leandersson, as merely a well-meaning friend, a super-buddy, every put-upon adolescent boy's fantasy. But the film doesn't let us off the hook so easily -- it is at times horrifically violent, a violence enhanced by its rarity and by the restrained way in which it's pictorially composed -- and so, reflecting on the film afterward, it becomes increasingly difficult to sustain the "cuddly" version of what we've just seen. It's a film that invites, encourages, even demands cognitive dissonance in the viewer.

Let The Right One In

Pre-Teenage Wasteland

Alfredson's visual style is striking; the most notable characteristic is his overwhelming preference for the color white, which sets Let The Right One In apart from most pictures in the Gothic/horror vein. Where your average vampire movie might luxuriate in saturated reds, or gloomy, fog-ridden greys and shadowy blacks, this one seems to have been bleached. It's not just that there are endless exterior shots of snowy suburban expanses, frozen lakes, and so forth; protagonist Oskar's hair is shockingly light blond, interiors are mostly brightly lit, and even the nighttime scenes seem to pulsate in the frigid glow of sodium streetlamps.

Let The Right One In

Best use of disturbed cats since the Alien films

I must now delve further into spoiler territory, so you have been warned. The Necker Cube quality of the film -- its seeming to be two different things depending on how you look at it -- is underlined in Terrence Rafferty's recent New York Times article about the upcoming remake, Let Me In, which will star Chloe Moretz, who punched and kicked and cussed her way into many a breathless comic geek's heart in this spring's Kick-Ass. Rafferty quotes comments by novelist Brian Evenson, who says that from one perspective, Let The Right One In is "about how one becomes a sort of Renfield-like procurer for a vampire." Indeed, when the credits roll, we are so glad -- despite the appalling violence of the starkly staged climax -- to see Oskar and Eli happily together, that we don't realize for a while what a terrible deal this is for the boy. He has essentially been shanghaied by a vampire who needs a new lackey. The genius of the film is that it shows this process from the point of view of the lackey: because Oskar's relationship with this beautiful monster fills a desperate emotional void in his life, and because she genuinely loves him and will protect him, we cannot quite bring ourselves to disapprove of their friendship, any more than we can dislike Eli, for all our awareness that she chows down on innocent townsfolk every few days.

I'm reminded of Roger Ebert's commentary about the secret of The Silence of the Lambs's success: it is that Hannibal Lecter is, to the extent that he is capable of acting beyond his psychotic impulses, a good person, and wants to do the right thing. We sense that he would not harm neophyte FBI agent Clarice Starling, and so we like him, and forgive him all those murders of people we never really cared about. The heart is not mathematical; our likes and dislikes are more strongly bound up in questions of personal loyalty than of by-the-books virtue. That's probably why so many readers find Wuthering Heights's Heathcliff -- who by any reasonable standard is a right bastard -- so compelling. With her understated, matter-of-fact, unapologetic performance as Eli, Leandersson joins an illustrious roster of charismatic monsters stretching back through cinema history -- not only Lecter, but Orson Welles's Harry Lime, Joe Pesci's Tommy De Vito, and many another. I can't wait to see how Moretz -- who was the second most memorable thing about Kick-Ass*, a film I didn't like much -- fills Leandersson's shoes.

*For me, the most memorable part of that film was the brief scene in which two masked heroes bop along to Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy" while driving toward a dangerous destination. Yeah, I'm weird.

Posted at 10:26 PM in Film | Permalink

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