Comments on: LET THE RIGHT ONE IN http://www.electricsheepmagazine.co.uk/reviews/2009/04/01/let-the-right-one-in/ A Deviant View of Cinema - Film, DVD & Book Reviews Thu, 09 Feb 2012 12:28:03 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 By: YogaPunguin http://www.electricsheepmagazine.co.uk/reviews/2009/04/01/let-the-right-one-in/comment-page-1/#comment-15802 YogaPunguin Mon, 25 May 2009 23:32:24 +0000 http://www.electricsheepmagazine.co.uk/reviews/2009/04/01/let-the-right-one-in/#comment-15802 Should I admit I watched this DVD six times in 2 weeks - despite the fact the English subtitles differ markedly from the original theatrical subtitles? Despite the fact the English language dubbing is far from the best? (They did at least read from the theatrical subtitles.) Each time I start this I think, Too slow. Too cheap. Too quiet. Too static. But I'm soon hooked and marveling at the fact it's over already. This movie is not perfect but it has haunted me like no other. Should I admit I watched this DVD six times in 2 weeks – despite the fact the English subtitles differ markedly from the original theatrical subtitles? Despite the fact the English language dubbing is far from the best? (They did at least read from the theatrical subtitles.)

Each time I start this I think, Too slow. Too cheap. Too quiet. Too static. But I’m soon hooked and marveling at the fact it’s over already.

This movie is not perfect but it has haunted me like no other.

]]> By: Celluloid Liberation Front http://www.electricsheepmagazine.co.uk/reviews/2009/04/01/let-the-right-one-in/comment-page-1/#comment-15216 Celluloid Liberation Front Sun, 26 Apr 2009 18:36:39 +0000 http://www.electricsheepmagazine.co.uk/reviews/2009/04/01/let-the-right-one-in/#comment-15216 Thomas Alfredson's film, based on a successful debut novel – the interesting book by John Ajvide Lindqvist - is the unfaithful translation of a faithful betrayal; and it is precisely through such a daedal genesis that this artistic operation offers itself as one of the most striking transpositions of a classical literary horror, 'Carmilla' by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. Lindqvist is clearly looking at the story published in 1871, imposing on his gothic love story nuances of tender morbidity and an ambiguous sexual characterization of its protagonists, and yet, the crude realism of certain passages, of certain narrative places distance his work from the abstract 'kammerspiel' staged by Le Fanu. The screen transposition, signed by Lindqvist himself, has on the contrary suggested a profound rethinking of the plot and its development, such rethinking has the paradoxical merit of having accosted the film to the atmosphere and inspiration of the archetypal 19th century novel. It was chosen for example to reduce the characters - zooming even closer - around the relationship between Oskar and Eli, indispensable interpretative key for the relations weaved with the other characters. At the same time it was opted for - during the writing phase - a more allusive orchestration of the characters and situations able to leave off screen the literal elucidations about the roles and fates of the other participants. Quite significant apropos is the transformation of Hakan who, explicitly described as a paedophile in the book, becomes in the film a sort of Lost Child, a deforming mirror, an aged double for Oskar’s facial features: this doubling acquires sense during the finale when, recalling the beginning of the film, we are left to imagine the old assassin of the first scenes as one of the (many?) Eli's companions, obsolesced next to the immortal vampire. The directing is clearly deployed under this perspective immersing the characters in fixed frames, able to accumulate a hold back tension in situations of congealing motionlessness and cerebral stylization: for instance when the two girls find the corpse of the bloodsucker’s first victim while the protagonist hits one of the bullies in his ear provoking a bloody efflorescence on the white and candid landscape. Only the faces of Eli and Oskar are vitalized by stirred and unstable camera takes that study the transforming physiognomies of adolescents immersed into a black ‘bildungsroman’. These very qualities – representing the most remarkable formal data of an imperfect product that remains fascinating in its essential design – accost the film to Le Fanu’s tones: the exclusive relationship between Carmilla and Laura, the stillness of the plot, the absolute present time of the story, in relation to which the ‘before’ and the ‘after’ are allusively disguised in the form of an impenetrable past and an impossible future, without ever mentioning the two temporal dimensions. Coldly trapped into an endless present time Oskar and Eli’s relationship disquietingly alternates passionate élans to calculating iciness. If in ‘Carmilla’ the vampire seduces a young girl, in ‘Let the Right One In’ Eli falls for a boy whose bodily characterization is not casually fairly feminine and oppressed by a society of (little) men to which Oskar cannot adapt. Is Eli in fact to possess, symbolically, from behind, during the night when they decide, with an exquisite infantile seriousness, to go steady; and it is Eli again to, manly, resolve the consequences of Oskar’s weaknesses in the unaccomplished ending that nonetheless remains coherent with the film. Doing so, the mirror game that governs the gothic myth of Le Fanu – two girls that looking at each other, strangely, sinisterly, recognize themselves – is re-enacted in ‘Let The Right One In’: a feminine boy glares himself unto a masculine girl and suddenly sees his self for the first time. Not casually the film begins and finish with Oskar touching his specular image on the glass: in this process of maturation – which is essentially the acceptation of his violent half – lies the greatest affinity between Lindqvist’s story and ‘Carmilla’. It is through the awareness of a wicked humanity via Eli’s eyes that Oskar accepts the sanguinary side of his subdued temperament. Thomas Alfredson’s film, based on a successful debut novel – the interesting book by John Ajvide Lindqvist – is the unfaithful translation of a faithful betrayal; and it is precisely through such a daedal genesis that this artistic operation offers itself as one of the most striking transpositions of a classical literary horror, ‘Carmilla’ by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. Lindqvist is clearly looking at the story published in 1871, imposing on his gothic love story nuances of tender morbidity and an ambiguous sexual characterization of its protagonists, and yet, the crude realism of certain passages, of certain narrative places distance his work from the abstract ‘kammerspiel’ staged by Le Fanu. The screen transposition, signed by Lindqvist himself, has on the contrary suggested a profound rethinking of the plot and its development, such rethinking has the paradoxical merit of having accosted the film to the atmosphere and inspiration of the archetypal 19th century novel. It was chosen for example to reduce the characters – zooming even closer – around the relationship between Oskar and Eli, indispensable interpretative key for the relations weaved with the other characters. At the same time it was opted for – during the writing phase – a more allusive orchestration of the characters and situations able to leave off screen the literal elucidations about the roles and fates of the other participants. Quite significant apropos is the transformation of Hakan who, explicitly described as a paedophile in the book, becomes in the film a sort of Lost Child, a deforming mirror, an aged double for Oskar’s facial features: this doubling acquires sense during the finale when, recalling the beginning of the film, we are left to imagine the old assassin of the first scenes as one of the (many?) Eli’s companions, obsolesced next to the immortal vampire.
The directing is clearly deployed under this perspective immersing the characters in fixed frames, able to accumulate a hold back tension in situations of congealing motionlessness and cerebral stylization: for instance when the two girls find the corpse of the bloodsucker’s first victim while the protagonist hits one of the bullies in his ear provoking a bloody efflorescence on the white and candid landscape. Only the faces of Eli and Oskar are vitalized by stirred and unstable camera takes that study the transforming physiognomies of adolescents immersed into a black ‘bildungsroman’.
These very qualities – representing the most remarkable formal data of an imperfect product that remains fascinating in its essential design – accost the film to Le Fanu’s tones: the exclusive relationship between Carmilla and Laura, the stillness of the plot, the absolute present time of the story, in relation to which the ‘before’ and the ‘after’ are allusively disguised in the form of an impenetrable past and an impossible future, without ever mentioning the two temporal dimensions. Coldly trapped into an endless present time Oskar and Eli’s relationship disquietingly alternates passionate élans to calculating iciness. If in ‘Carmilla’ the vampire seduces a young girl, in ‘Let the Right One In’ Eli falls for a boy whose bodily characterization is not casually fairly feminine and oppressed by a society of (little) men to which Oskar cannot adapt. Is Eli in fact to possess, symbolically, from behind, during the night when they decide, with an exquisite infantile seriousness, to go steady; and it is Eli again to, manly, resolve the consequences of Oskar’s weaknesses in the unaccomplished ending that nonetheless remains coherent with the film. Doing so, the mirror game that governs the gothic myth of Le Fanu – two girls that looking at each other, strangely, sinisterly, recognize themselves – is re-enacted in ‘Let The Right One In’: a feminine boy glares himself unto a masculine girl and suddenly sees his self for the first time. Not casually the film begins and finish with Oskar touching his specular image on the glass: in this process of maturation – which is essentially the acceptation of his violent half – lies the greatest affinity between Lindqvist’s story and ‘Carmilla’. It is through the awareness of a wicked humanity via Eli’s eyes that Oskar accepts the sanguinary side of his subdued temperament.

]]>