Let "Let" Be

Is it possible for a movie most people have never heard of to be overhyped? Seems a contradiction, but I recently learned the answer to that is "yes."

Such was my experience with the film Let the Right One In. A movie released last year in Sweden (and already optioned for an American remake, naturally), this movie was pretty much heralded in horror circles as the resurrection of the vampire genre. (You know, because HBO's True Blood and that little movie you might have heard of called Twilight demonstrated how on fumes the genre was until now.) I'd heard so many good things about the movie from so many places that I resolved fairly early on to learn nothing further about the film until I'd seen it. So all I knew was: it was Swedish, it involved vampires, and it was supposed to be really good.

Wrong expectations.

So here's what the movie is really about. It tells the story of an early teenage boy who befriends a strange loner girl who appears to be the same age as he. But in truth, she's an ancient vampire who has just had to sever ties (read: arteries) with the "thrall" she has relied upon to compensate for her small stature in the adult world.

Oh, and for no reason I can discern, it's set in the 1970s.

It does sound like a fairly intriguing premise, but imagine you're me, expecting "the next great vampire movie." You can see my problem -- this movie is a relatively introspective, dramatic piece punctuated with a couple moments of violence. Despite being set up, I still tried to approach the material as objectively as I could. But I still found it lacking.

The script, in both plot and pacing, is a bit lacking in places. The vampire girl's first thrall is shown in the early film, and is so pathetically inept that, while it justifies her need to "trade up," it makes you wonder how the arrangement could ever have been effective. Long stretches of the film pass with very little activity.

You have incredibly cool and subtle makeup and visual effects used sparingly to convey an unsettling otherness about the girl one moment. Then you have the most bizarre and unnecessary bit of nudity I've ever seen in a movie. One moment, there are incredibly cool displays of what happens to vampires who break the rules (exposure to sunlight, entering a house without invitation). The next moment, we're wasting huge chunks of time on poorly established secondary characters.

There's a lot to like in the movie, to be sure, but it's buried amidst a lot that's not likeable. Perhaps this is one case where an American remake of a foreign film might be appropriate and desireable. Maybe the flaws I see in the film are more a case of cultural divide, and an American version -- assuming it can be true to the spirit of the piece, and not just gore it up like Hostel 12/Saw LXVIII -- might be a good thing. But as it is, I can only rate the movie a C+.

If you're an absolute horror junkie, or love foreign films, you might want to check it out. Otherwise, I suggest you pass.