Best of 2008; Best Movie; Let the Right One In

Vampires are, or must be, deep grim, and dark creatures. For me they are closer to Mahler than to a heavy metal song. They aren’t wild animal and absolutely they are not beauty teens that shine in the daylight. They are a metaphor of us, of our darker side, which maybe is the most human one. Vampires are melancholic, sad and introspective.

Swedish films are beautiful and poetic. They, or at least the Swedish films I like, are intimate approaches to our deepest emotions, deeper fears and questions; memories, death and the infinite and apparently senseless search of happiness. Swedish films are melancholic, sad and introspective.

Adolescence is a hard age. Everything looks pointless; you can understand neither the world nor even yourself. Having twelve isn’t the happier stage in people’s life (Or maybe it just wasn’t for me), and having twelve for many years, shouldn’t be funny at all. Adolescence is melancholic, sad, an introspective.

And that’s why everything fits so well in Let the Right One In to make it a beautiful and poetic film. A melancholic tale about: loneliness, innocence, friendship, love, brutality, and off course, vampires.

With a cold city covered with snow as backcloth, which resembles the cold of the human relationships of its inhabitants. The human contact practically doesn’t exist, besides the brutality by action or by omission. There the young Oskar suffers the loneliness and the hostility of the world. The Indifference of his mother, and the abuse of the local bullies. But all this change when Eli enters his life, and so, two solitudes turn into a friendship. And the movie show us how we can survive the grimmer world, if we have someone at our side.

Let the Right One In is melancholic, sad and introspective. As any good fantasy story, it’s a beautiful metaphor that show us the deeper sides of the human nature, that reality sometimes can’t show.