Let the Right One In

Let the Right One In is the best vampire film ever made and it is a film about grooming, told from the point of view of the person being groomed, who is happy.

Alfredson shoots Blackeberg in the winter of 1981 as a set of flat, snow-lit, under-populated frames: tower blocks, a climbing frame, a chain-link fence, a swimming pool, a tunnel of trees. The camera almost never moves. There is very little score. Children speak at normal volume about appalling things. The violence, when it comes, is usually in the middle distance or just out of frame, and the film's single most famous shot is a static wide of a swimming pool from under the water.

Inside that, two performances. Kåre Hedebrant's Oskar is a small, pale, frightened boy who collects newspaper clippings about murders, keeps a knife he is too afraid to use, and rehearses revenge alone in the courtyard. Lina Leandersson's Eli is the one who tells him to hit back. The relationship is the warmest thing in the film and the most alarming, because everything Eli gives him is real and everything Eli needs from him is a replacement.

Håkan is the key to the whole film

The middle-aged man living with Eli is not her father. He is her provider: he goes out at night with a canister, a funnel and a plastic container to kill people and bring blood home, and he is failing at it. The film never states what the arrangement is or was, and it only needs one shot of his face when Eli comes home having fed herself to tell you. He is what Oskar is being recruited to become, and he is forty years further along.

The pool is one of the great endings in horror

Oskar is held under the water by an older boy with a knife to the eye, by a count of three. The camera stays under with him. What happens above the surface is heard rather than seen, and then a severed head drifts down into the frame. It is twenty seconds, one take, no score, and it is simultaneously a rescue, a massacre and the moment the film's whole argument closes.

Where it is difficult

It is slow, cold and deliberately affectless, and viewers who need warmth from direction rather than from performance find it inert. The CGI cats are a disaster. And the film softens the novel's hardest material to a single glimpsed image, which some readers consider a loss of nerve and others consider the correct choice.

For the novel's and the genre's founding rules, Dracula; for the same cold-climate child's-eye dread, The Witch; for the same friendship that is a recruitment, Talk to Me.

The short answer: after Håkan's death Eli feeds alone, kills Lacke in Oskar's bathroom in front of him, and leaves Blackeberg — telling Oskar she has to. At school the gym teacher takes Oskar's class to the pool. Conny's older brother Jimmy arrives, clears the pool of witnesses, and offers Oskar a deal: he will cut out one eye unless Oskar can hold his breath under water for three minutes. He forces Oskar's head under. The camera stays below the surface with him. There is a sudden commotion above, two legs are dragged out of frame, a severed head sinks past Oskar, and a hand reaches in and pulls him up. Eli has killed all three boys. The final scene is Oskar on a train in daylight, happy, with a large covered trunk beside him, tapping Morse code on the lid — their private code for "kiss" — and something tapping back.

What happens at the end of the pool scene?

Eli kills Jimmy, Conny and Martin in the few seconds Oskar is underwater. The film shows almost none of it: a splash, a body pulled sideways, a head and a severed arm entering the water, and then Eli's hand. Oskar surfaces to a swimming pool with bodies in it and smiles at her. It is the one moment the film allows itself a cue on the soundtrack, and the smile is the horror.

Who is Håkan in Let the Right One In?

The man Eli lives with, who presents as her father and is not. He hunts for her — the film shows him preparing a kit, hanging a boy upside down over a bucket in a wood, and being interrupted by a passing dog walker. When he is caught he pours acid on his own face in his hospital bed so he cannot be identified, and then offers Eli his throat at the window. She takes it and he falls. The film implies, without stating, that he was once in Oskar's position.

Is Eli a girl or a boy?

The film says "I'm not a girl" and shows, in a single brief shot as Eli changes, a scarred and mutilated groin. Lindqvist's novel is explicit: Eli was a boy named Elias, castrated by a nobleman in the eighteenth century at the moment of being turned. The film reduces this to one image and one line, and Eli's gender is deliberately left as something Oskar does not need an answer to.

What are the rules for vampires in this film?

Three, applied strictly. Eli cannot enter a home without being invited — and Oskar's test of this is the film's most upsetting scene, in which Eli walks in anyway and begins to bleed from everywhere until he says it. Sunlight causes immediate combustion, which the film demonstrates in a hospital room with the blinds opened. And infection is transmitted by the bite: Virginia survives an attack, becomes photosensitive, and asks to be killed.

Why does Oskar leave with Eli?

Because the film has spent two hours making it the only available ending and refusing to call it a happy one. Oskar has no father who turns up, a mother who does not see him, and three boys who tried to drown him; Eli is the only person who has ever told him he is worth defending. The final shot — a boy on a train with a trunk, tapping a code — is the recruitment completing. He is twelve. Håkan was probably twelve once too.

Scored against the published rubric, here is what the numbers mean.

Tone 012 is bleak — 22 works score lower. Everyone who loves anybody in this film loses, and the ending is a child's life being consumed with his full enthusiastic consent.

Pace 016 is extremely slow — only 15 works are slower. The camera is static, the cuts are long, and whole sequences are two children not talking.

Viscera 044 is just under the median — 51 works score lower. A throat opened in a tunnel, a body drained over a bucket, a self-inflicted acid burn, a spontaneous combustion, and a severed head in a swimming pool.

The threat at 028 is on the supernatural side — 33 works score lower. Eli is not human. Every other cruelty in the film — the bullying, the knife, the drowning, Håkan's arrangement — is entirely human.

Era bias 058 is just above the midpoint, which reads oddly for a film set in 1981: the period is immaculate and the filmmaking is 2008 digital-era in its stillness and its grade.

Reality anchor 034 is grounded — 21 works score lower. One suburb, consistent rules, no sequence that cannot be read literally.

On jump scares: almost none. The film startles perhaps twice and both times by sound.