Let the Right One In

Tomas Alfredson's Let the Right One In (Låt den rätte komma in) opened in 2008 and won the Best Narrative Feature prize at the Tribeca Film Festival, alongside the Saturn Award for Best International Film and a substantial international critical reception. The film consolidated Alfredson, after his earlier Swedish television and film work, as one of the most internationally significant Swedish directors of his generation; he would extend the same register through the 2011 English-language Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Adapted by John Ajvide Lindqvist from his own 2004 novel.

In a Stockholm suburb in 1982, the bullied and lonely twelve-year-old Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant) lives with his single mother in one of the apartment blocks of the Blackeberg district. He befriends Eli (Lina Leandersson), the mysterious girl who has just moved in next door with an older man, and slowly begins to understand that Eli is not what she appears to be. Per Ragnar plays the older guardian; Henrik Dahl plays Oskar's father.

The film operates simultaneously as horror, coming-of-age drama, and meditation on loneliness. Hoyte van Hoytema's photography of pale-blue Swedish-winter exteriors and pale-yellow Swedish-apartment-block interiors is among the most distinctive of recent Scandinavian cinema. The two child performances are the film's foundational achievement; Leandersson's central work has been compared favourably to the great Scandinavian child performances of the past. The 2010 Hollywood remake (Let Me In, with Chloë Grace Moretz) was respectable; the original is irreplaceable.