Let the Right One In

Call it the Armageddon/Deep Impact phenomenon. Or the Tombstone/Wyatt Earp phenomenon. Or the Dante's Peak/Volcano phenomenon. Whichever your preferred example, you know what I'm referring to: the semi-annual fluke occurrence in which two movies with essentially the same plot are released within the same year. Over the years, it seems like the types of movies involved in this type of scheduling voodoo have changed. They've gone from high concept (An Asteroid/Comet is on a collision-course with earth and only Bruce Willis/Robert Duvall can stop it!) to puzzlingly obscure. I thought this trend had reached it's apotheosis when the startlingly close release dates of Capote and Infamous showed that there was a deep cultural yearning for film biographies of Truman Capote that I'd never noticed before. Not to mention our mid-2000s craze for movies about Victorian magicians.

Truman Capote is an asteroid on a collision course with a volcano compared to the latest case of cinematic parallel construction. 2008 saw the release of two, count 'em two adaptations of young adult novels about confused kids falling in love with vampires. The high-profile one was Catherine Hardwick's film version of the first entry in a hugely popular book series by Stephanie Meyer, Twilight, which is coming out on DVD and which will see legions of squealing tween girls bum-rushing the nation's retail outlets this weekend. Twilight is a huge hit, both as a book and as a film, because of its use of the Romantic vampire archetype. The classic vampire attack from Stoker onward, in which a broodingly attractive man visits a sleeping young woman in her room and sinks his fangs into her throat, is a thinly veiled sex act, and since the Victorian era, writers and filmmakers have taken advantage of this fact to titillate audiences without scandalizing them. Nowadays, with audiences more jaded than ever, Stephanie Meyer wisely zeroed in on the one constituency that still needs their racy material sublimated. The inherent sensuality of the vampiric allows Meyer and Hardwick to tap into the budding sex drive of millions of teenage girls who are discovering lust, but are still threatened by overt sexuality. So Twilight presents a sexy, virtuous vampire who abstains from premarital sex and drinking human blood, but his carnal appetites for his human beloved are there for all to see, and for all the Hannah Montana set to chastely pant over.

Let the Right One In, directed by Tomas Alfredson and adapted from a novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist (brace yourself: it's Swedish), hones in on another facet of the vampire mythos that can prove seductive to a young person; the power vampires hold over life and death. Just as puberty brings strange and threatening feelings of sexual awareness, it also brings a growing understanding of a teenager's essential powerlessness. Powerlessness breeds frustration and, in the surging torrent of pubescent hormones, aggression. An invincible, death dealing bloodsucker makes for a satisfying fantasy role model.

The film reverses the usual gender dynamic of the vampire romance, with twelve year old Oscar (Kare Hedebrant) developing a friendship with a strange young girl, Eli (Lina Leandersson) living in his apartment complex. She doesn't attend school, never comes out during the day, and sends her father out to drain the blood from hapless fellow Swedes for her feedings. Oscar is a friendless child of divorce, subject to constant bullying at his school, and his budding attraction to Eli is driven less by sexual urges than a growing attraction to her strength and potential for violent action.

Let the Right One In is a spiritual heir to the classic 1973 Spanish film Spirit of the Beehive. Both are restrained, elegantly composed films that examine how children process the concept of death through the allegorical intervention of a mythical monster. Beehives' Frankenstein monster never makes his presence known as blood-splatteringly as the young vampire in Right One, Eli comes into Oscar's life for the first time while he's stabbing a tree, imagining that it's one of his tormentors, as though his murderous desires had willed her into being. From here, the film takes a series of dark and challenging turns, guided at all times by a positively Scandinavian directorial austerity that makes the explosions of violence extra jarring and gives the developing relationship between the two young, murder-minded lovers plenty of room to germinate. The deadpan style pays off most impressively during a closing sequence that consummates the bond between the young boy and the immortal blood-sucker. It also raises unsettling questions about the very nature of the universally treacherous path we all take towards adulthood, and how we come to choose our loves and fulfill our desires.