#10

Set deep in a Scandinavian winter, Let the Right One In is a dark movie. Dark material, dark sensibilities and a dark, dark sky that crushes down on the characters with an enveloping, bleak power. The Swedish film focuses on a lonely boy who discovers a strange new friend in his apartment complex. It is a girl who appears to be about his age, but is actually ageless. She’s initially curious but standoffish, declaring the impossibility of friendship between the two. In a way, she’s right. What emerges feels like more than friendship, certainly more than the sort of playful, superficial friendship common to that age. In the art of director Tomas Alfredson and screenwriter John Ajvide Lindqvist (adapting his own novel), the connection between these two is deeper, a mutual understanding between aching outcasts. While the film has extra resonance because of the effectiveness of that central relationship, it’s fiercely dedicated to the rawer, bloodier side of things. The supernatural attacks in the film are brutal, savage. Yet somehow they don’t compare to the cruelty of the bullies that persecute the main character. Alfredson brings the same tension to those hard moments as he does to the nastiest, goriest scenes. The most thrilling part of this film is this attention to detail, this willingness to turn away from headlong shocks to understand the quiet brutality that exists every day and the ways oddly sympathetic souls can unexpectedly connect in its shadow.

(Posted simultaneously to “Jelly-Town!”)