#23 Let the Right One In (2008) Tomas Alfredson

Small Kiss

Let the Right One In, more than This is England or Rodger Dodger (two films I like a lot), is able to express school-yard angst and growing pains at a heightened level because it does not commit to a realm of ultra-real or believability.

Thanks to its vampire trope, Let the Right One In, grants itself the wiggle room it takes to make a great picture. Through its broadness of scope, this film, unlike most all coming of age films, presents itself with pride and confidence, whereas, typically, this genre suffers the same wilty-ness and apprehension of their center characters.

Let the Right One In doesn't bother lying to its audience, it doesn't attempt to convince anyone that the characters you like and watch the most are any more decent than the characters who live in the fringes of the film. The bullies we see at the start of the film, the villains, are only people who are gifted or beautiful or themselves bullied enough to enact violence on others. And when our hero befriends a vampire who is multitudes more dangerous than the bullies, she pays them back with a massacre.

Let the Right One In understands the cycle of victimhood and knows that a picked-on adolescent doesn't just want the bullies to stop hassling him/her, he/she really want them all to pay with their lives. Violence begets more violence. The entire vampire genre is built on this platform, but by in large it is taken for granted. Vampire films focuss on whether or not the vampire should sire her love into immortality, Let the Right One In explores the sadness of this never being an option.