Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant) and Eli (Lina Leandersson) discover a different kind of love in LET THE RIGHT ONE IN
WAVERLY MIDNIGHTS: LET THE RIGHT ONE IN (LÅT DEN RÄTTE KOMMA IN) (Tomas Alfredson, 2008)
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Saturday, August 15, 12 midnight
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On August 21, Sinister II will be unleashed on the world, the sequel to the 2012 horror hit Sinister, which starred Ethan Hawke and Juliet Rylance. (The sequel doesn’t feature any similarly familiar names.) In preparation for the release, Sinister II director Ciarán Foy has selected films that inspired him, creating the brief Waverly Midnights series “Sinister Saturdays” at the IFC Center. The frightfest began August 8 with Gore Verbinski’s remake of The Ring and concludes August 22 with Sinister, but the real gem is the original Swedish thriller Let the Right One In, a chilling yet tender coming-of-age story about friendship and the meaning of family. In a snow-covered Stockholm suburb, twelve-year-old Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant) is severely bullied by Conny (Patrik Rydmark), Andreas (Johan Sömnes), and Martin (Mikael Erhardsson). The frail, blond Oskar dreams of getting even, but he always backs down. But then he meets the dark-haired, somewhat feral Eli (Lina Leandersson, dubbed by Elif Ceylan), who has moved in next door in their apartment complex. While Oskar lives with his divorced mother (Karin Bergquist) — his father (Henrik Dahl) has moved out to the country — Eli lives with Håkan (Per Ragnar), an older father figure who goes out to gather what Eli needs to survive: blood. But the aging Håkan begins encountering difficulties, forcing Eli to go out and hunt down her own food. As people start to go missing in the small community, Eli and Oskar’s friendship begins to blossom, two outsiders coming to terms with who they are. But when Oskar suddenly strikes back, Conny’s older brother, Jimmy (Rasmus Luthander), gets involved, and the stakes get a whole lot higher.
Eli (Lina Leandersson) is not quite your average twelve-year-old girl in tender Swedish horror film
Based on the 2004 novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist, Let the Right One In is a gripping horror film that is one of the best of the young century. By making the protagonists children with common adolescent problems, Lindqvist, who wrote the screenplay, and director Tomas Alfredson (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy) create a more realistic setting, so the scares are that much more intense. Hedebrant and Leandersson have a magical chemistry, their tentativeness and fears intoxicating. They exist in a world that is meant only for them; all of the adults are essentially peripheral, whether parents, teachers, or community members wondering what is going on, and the other kids are merely in their way. And it’s all about that very moment; they both might be twelve, but Eli is going to be that age forever while Oskar gets older. The atmosphere is thick and tense throughout, elevated by Hoyte van Hoytema’s inventive cinematography and Johan Söderqvist’s dramatic score, performed by the Slovak National Symphony Orchestra. Despite some very memorable scenes involving shocking violence, at its heart Let the Right One In is a sweetly innocent love story, albeit with a few unusual complications. Matt Reeves directed a 2010 English-language remake starring Kodi Smit-McPhee and Chloë Grace Moretz, and the National Theatre of Scotland staged a terrific theatrical adaptation that played at St. Ann’s Warehouse earlier this year, but there’s still nothing like the original, a visually stunning and psychologically adept fresh new take on the vampire legend.
In a 1984 interview with Gideon Bachmann for a special issue of the Swedish film journal Chaplin, Soviet auteur Andrei Tarkovsky said, “I don’t believe that there exists any form of art film that can be understood by everyone. . . . It is not essential for me to be understood by everyone.” Tarkovsky was referring specifically to his latest work, the 1983 poetic masterpiece Nostalghia, although he could have been referring to almost any of his seven feature-length films. Nostalghia is a gorgeously told tale of loneliness, alienation, faith, devotion, and the search for home and family, the first film that Tarkovsky made outside of Russia, in Italy. It’s also about light and dark, as Tarkovsky and cinematographer Giuseppe Lanci explore chiaroscuro effects, often incorporating candles to create mesmerizing glows and elongated shadows while alternating between color, sepia, and black-and-white. Written by Tarkovsky and Tonino Guerra, who also collaborated with Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini, the Taviani brothers, and many others, the film opens in a vast, dark, foggy landscape, where married poet Andrei Gorchakov (Oleg Yanovsky, with strange white patches in his black hair), who is in Italy researching a book on eighteenth-century Russian composer Pavel Sosnovsky, and Eugenia, his Italian translator (Domiziana Giordano), have driven to a remote church to look at a fresco of the Madonna of Childbirth. Inside the church, Tarkovsky and Lanci establish one of their key visual motifs for the film, long, slow shots that pan across vertical elements — columns here, and trees and poles later, with characters showing up in one part of the shot and then another, impossibly, without the camera cutting away. Eugenia, who has flowing blond hair, is reading a book of poems by Arseni Tarkovsky, the director’s father, in Italian, but Gorchakov tells her to throw it away. “Poetry is untranslatable, like the whole of art,” he says, a sly reference to the director’s first Italian film.
