Let The Right One In - Johan Soderqvist [2009]

For some time teenagers the world over have been getting erotic kicks from vampires on page and screen. Mainstreaming and commoditisation inevitably obscure the psychologically troubled themes at the heart of the genre: aliention, isolation, troubling sexual and transgressive impulses. 

2009's Let The Right One In reinstated the potency with a perfectly balanced mix of romantic bildungsroman and revenge on the bullies shocks. Set in early 80s Sweden, the film's 12-year-old hero -  sweet-natured, shy, studious Oskar -  is being bullied at school. One night, while he's stabbing a tree with a knife, a girl his own age appears in the frozen playground. She's pretty, barefoot, moves with a nimble grace, has a pale complexion with dark rings under her eyes and turns out to be a dab hand at Rubik's Cube. Eli has recently moved in next door to Oskar, and lives with Håkan, a middle-aged man she calls her father. She only comes out after dark, when the school day ends and is, of course, a vampire.

Johan Soderqvist's score fully renders the icy mis en scene and snow-bound landscape as a setting for this oddly innocent romance between the two "children". Perhaps deliberately, Soderqvist references the elegaic feel of autumnal 80s Morricone work such as The Mission - crucially, without overdoing it.

Intimate, affecting and rather beautiful.

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