Elias Millward

Based on the novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist, set in a snow-laden Swedish suburb in the 1980s, Let The Right One In, is not your archetypal vampire story, but rather a touching parable within a social-realist milieu that reveals the lonely emotional truths of childhood.
Oskar, the central protagonist, is a twelve-year-old boy who finds himself the victim of high school bullying. One evening, in the snow-covered courtyard of his apartment block, he encounters Eli, a young girl and neighbour who recently moved into the apartment next door with a man whom she calls father.
Alfredson is skilful in creating a visually and tactually spare and indelible film of startling beauty and intensity. The mundane becomes beautiful through the use of cinematography: The placid everyday scenes of suburbia are painted in muted tones; the composition of these scenes is simple, unsentimental. The macabre seriality of the Let The Right One In is intensified by setting this supernatural story in a very naturalistic and everyday environment. Arguably, no other director has been so successful in creating a work which undermines the vampire genre since George Romero’s 1977 film, Martin.