Let the Right One In.

"For Swedish director Tomas Alfredson, the eyes have it - that scary quality just right for horror," writes Susan King in the Los Angeles Times. "So when Alfredson set out to make the eerie film Let the Right One In, about the friendship that develops between two adolescents - one of whom happens to be a vampire - he didn't watch any horror movies for inspiration. Instead, he studied paintings to see how they used 'eye-to-eye contact,' he says. 'I studied Renaissance painters; one, called Hans Holbein, has a very strange way of dealing with eyes.' Alfredson was especially taken with Holbein's 1538 painting Edward VI as a Child. The prince, Alfredson says, 'is looking outside the frame and under it. It's very strange and very scary.'"

Updated through 10/29.

"The coming-of-age story and the vampire tale may seem like an odd pairing, but Alfredson draws the film's sustaining tension out of the inverse relationship between the intractable power of vampirism and the impotent sufferings of youth," writes Andrew Schenker in Slant.

"From the opening moments, in which the screen is overtaken by silent, softly falling snowflakes that, with their lovely morbidity, might as well be leftover sprinkles from the closing lines of James Joyce's The Dead, to an underwater climax as gory as it is hushed and idyllic, Let the Right One In means to push the contemporary vampire film into an ambitiously poetic realm," writes Michael Koresky at indieWIRE. "Alfredson mostly fulfills his charge, even if many of his techniques are borrowed from a trendily wan art-house aesthetic that relies too heavily on tight framing and oppressive close-ups (why are so many directors today scared of a good old-fashioned medium shot?) and a moodily melodramatic score that could have come straight from the plunked piano of Thomas Newman (American Beauty, The Shawshank Redemption). Yet for every cliched move, there is an abundance of memorable images in this drab fairy tale of tween vampire love."

"Though many of the traditional paraphernalia of the bloodsucking genre are present and accounted for in Tomas Alfredson's movie - teeth sink into necks, windows must be boarded lest the vampire expire in the light of day - this is a vampire movie like no other," writes Newsweek's David Ansen. "Horror is not the objective."

"Aside from a few gory, sticky scenes that were maybe meant to satisfy the vampires among us, the horror of Let the Right One In isn't horrible at all," writes Genevieve Yue in Reverse Shot. "Instead it fades to the background, surprisingly calm and even, in a sense, dully ordinary. Alfredson sets his film in what he calls 'a country that keeps going despite everything,' and it's here that we might understand the story as a metaphor after all, a vision of contemporary life driving inexorably forward, not without memory but without time to reflect."

"Let The Right One In has won numerous awards at various festivals and has received a great deal of press - many describing it as among the best vampire films ever made," notes Bob Turnbull. "Thing is, it isn't really a vampire film... It's much more the story of a young 12 year old boy learning how to relate to the people around him (his mother who smothers him, his father who wants to be buddies, the bullies at school, etc) and in particular his new neighbour Eli who is also 12 and a girl. Well, on the outside anyway..."

"The title refers to the lore that vampires won't cross your threshold unbidden, but Let the Right One In picks and chooses codes from the myth without getting hung up," writes Nicolas Rapold in the L Magazine. "And what's most surprising, perhaps, is how easy Alfredson makes it all seem, at a time when few seem capable of a fresh take on horror."

"[T]he audacious sound design - the silence of snow broken by faint sounds of a child breathing or eyelashes fluttering; the dense, vividly impressionistic noises of the vampire feeding - and wise performances from [Kare] Hedebrant and (especially) [Lina] Leandersson infuse the film with a low-key naturalism that allows for maximum believability," writes Elena Oumano in the Voice.

Updates, 10/24: "[W]hile Mr Alfredson takes a darkly amused attitude toward the little world he has fashioned with such care, he also takes the morbid unhappiness of his young characters seriously," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "Both are achingly alone, and it is the ordinary fact of their loneliness rather than their extraordinary circumstances that makes the film more than the sum of its chills and estimable technique."

"Let the Right One In has been described as a beautiful love story, and it's true the movie is something to look at," writes Carina Chocano in the LAT. "Alfredson has an uncommon gift for composition that, rendered through Hoyte Van Hoytema's limpid cinematography, is reminiscent of Flemish painting. This is what it would look like if Vermeer had ever decided to make a bloody horror movie. While the beauty is undeniable, the love part is dubious."

"Once Alfredson reveals that yes, there's a monstrosity in our midst, the director proves that he can yield poetry from the grammar of fright flicks," writes David Fear in Time Out New York. "Sequences we've seen dozens of times before - jugular snacking, gravity-defying scurrying, nocturnal raids on snoozing bloodsuckers - are rendered with macabre wit and superlative dread."

Steve Dollar talks with Alfredson for Paste; Kristin McCraken for Tribeca.

"About once a year, a filmmaker succeeds at creating truly idiosyncratic genre fare, employing all the tropes of a standard stock of classics (such as giant monsters in Bong Joon-ho's The Host) and working with them to create a stirring, original vision," writes Michael Lerman at Hammer to Nail. "This year, the well-deserved prize goes to Tomas Alfredson for his gentle depiction of child vampires in Let the Right One In."

Update, 10/27: "Some genre buffs may be disturbed by the fact that the 'rules' of vampire existence in this universe are never fully explained, and neither is Eli's back story," notes Andrew O'Hehir in Salon. "Where is she from? How and when did she become a vampire?... We learn about Eli exactly as Oskar does, and perhaps instinctively he knows enough to leave certain questions alone. She can fly, she has amazing and horrifying powers, she isn't exactly a boy or a girl, she can't come inside unless she's invited (hence the title) and she loves him. That's enough."

Update, 10/29: For IFC, Aaron Hillis talks with Alfredson "about child actors, how technology has crushed the Swedish film industry, and what makes him feel especially naked."

Posted by dwhudson at October 23, 2008 12:05 PM