Let the Right One In (2008)

Premise: A lonely 12 year-old boy, Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant), befriends the new girl in his apartment complex, Eli (Lina Leandersson). He needs her help to stand up to bullying, but, given that she's a vampire, her help might not be for the best.

Director Tomas Alfredson, working from John Ajvide Lindqvist's adaptation of his own novel, evokes a cold, oppressed atmosphere for this meditation on the nature and requirements of friendship. It's a strange movie, full of fuzzy close ups meant to keep you off-kilter. It's also remarkably smart, establishing certain relationships with a single glance and keeping others contained unbearably long.

Hedebrant gives a heartbreakingly vulnerable turn as a kid who is, perhaps, too trusting for his own good. The lovely Leandersson mirrors his work with a world-weariness that only serves to shadow how lonely Eli truly is as well.

It's to both Alfredson and Linqvist's credit that the answers don't come easy. Whether Oskar and Eli's friendship is good for either of them is not for the filmmakers to judge, it would seem. Instead, like the close ups, we're kept off kilter in a world that happens just outside the boundary of normal, that presses in on all sides without ever quite crossing over. Oskar lives his life in the margins, and his salvation comes from the same place. Whether that salvation has its place in grand scheme remains in question. A-

Sidebar: I know that this movie is set in the 80s, but were there no child supervision laws in Sweden at that time? Damn.