stopping by woods on a snowy evening

It's been a long time since I've seen a movie as intense as Let the Right One In. There aren't really words to describe the film's impact; this quote from Pajiba's review is as good an introduction as I can imagine:

It’s difficult to convey the experience of watching Let the Right One In with words. It doesn’t traffic in many words itself, for one thing, and those it does use are all Swedish. It would be easier to give a sense of the movie’s tone and impact, which has stayed with me for 72 hours and promises to linger for a while longer, by sitting down to perform a haunting piece for cello, or by standing alone with you, silently, during a snowstorm near an abandoned warehouse.

LtROI does not traffic in any of the easy tropes of American horror movies. In that way it's the opposite of the excellent French thriller Tell No One. That movie so thoroughly understood and inhabited thriller conventions that it was able to use them to tell a much bigger story. LtROI will be marketed and described as a horror movie, and there is much in it that fits that description, but the intensity that I described in the opening sentence is an intensity of emotion, of disquieted alienation, not that of adrenaline-loaded thrills.

LtROI was directed by Tomas Alfredson and adapted by John Ajvide Lindqvist from his own novel. The protagonist is Oskar, a 12-year-old who is so passive and boxed-in by life (he is tormented by loathsome bullies at school and lives with his single mom in the dreariest apartment building imaginable) that he barely deserves the designation. Alfredson's presentation of Oskar's life reminded me of both Bekmanbetov's Night Watch and The Lives of Others, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's Oscar-winning German film, in its depiction of the mundane details of lives going nowhere, and how the weirdest, gravest things may be happening in those lives. When Oskar meets Eli, who says she's "been twelve for a long time" and "not really a girl" (an offhand remark that carries much more weight in the novel; there's one brief shot in the movie that really explains what the character means), even the facts and hints of her vampiric existence are introduced in scenes of surpassing banality.

I do not want to write a plot synopsis. The movie's story is well-done and involving, but it is the emotional quality, especially the growing bond between Oskar and Eli, that insinuates intself into your soul. Let the Right One In is not an easy movie, and it's not for everyone, but I found it moving and I believe it will stay with me for a long, long time.