Let the right one come in

Tomas Alfredson's Let the right one come in is a dank, very disturbing Swedish vampire picture. The film evokes an era in Swedish history when, as the director says, "the country was one-half behind the iron curtain..." and the joyless worker-barracks-style subsidized housing where the action takes place is gloomy, disheartening, and, in the incessant snow, nightmarish enough even without the various gory murders, exsanguinations, and mutilations that occur in the film. This is Bergman-influenced Swedish filmmaking, without the great auteur's sense of beauty, and, I suppose, it is redundant to say that all the anguish and torment in the film yields an experience that is just barely endurable. Some of the movie was too horrible to watch and I fast-forwarded through the awful stuff, only to be sufficiently fascinated, and surprised (for the picture is continuously inventive and surprising) by the images to dutifully watch the dismal proceedings in actual time, then, even in slow-mo to see if I could figure out how the effects were accomplished -- they look digital to me. Elly is a 12 year old vampire who is, perhaps, three or four-hundred years old. She looks slightly middle-eastern -- perhaps, she has gypsy blood. Oscar, also 12, the human child in the story is a pale wraith of a boy, blonde to the point of albino pallor, with icy blue eyes and long white eyelashes -- in some ways, Oscar is stranger and more alien-looking than the child-vampire. The plot involves merciless bullying suffered by Oscar, cheerless alcoholism on the part of all of the adults in the miserable Bauhaus-worker barracks, and a strong, unsavory subtext of child abuse. The adults in the picture are all alcohol-bloated zombies -- they spend their time downing booze in a garishly lit Chinese buffet called The Sun Palace. Tormented by peers, teachers, and parents, poor Oscar has nowhere to turn but to Elly. But Elly is not really alive and leads an horribly denuded existence in a barren apartment with an adult man, whose role, as the film progressively demonstrates, is too ghastly to contemplate. (The scenes with Elly's factotum are genuinely nightmare-inducing). Alfredson is capable of great tact -- many of images of ultra-violence are staged in long-shot or from oblique angles. Furthermore, he never makes explicit a horror that the audience expects will be announced at the end of the movie, but which is never shown. Instead the picture ends on an ambiguous note, which Alfredson in his "Making of --" documentary disingenuously describes as "optimistic." Clearly, the Swedish director has studied Val Lewton's great horror cycle from the forties -- he restages the scenes with the swimming pool in Cat People, uses the famous "bus" effect from that movie (a bus suddenly entering the frame causes the spooked audience to jump out of their skins) and reprises the famous murder in the pedestrian tunnel from The Leopard Man. Elly's first appearance, dropping down weightlessly from a Jungle-Gym in a snowy playground is indelible and there are some gruesomely inventive images -- a mutilated man's last breath emerges into the icy night air through a hole acid has melted in his cheek. This film will haunt your sleep and disturb you -- if you want that from entertainment, then, I suppose the movie is recommended. I watched with great interest, but the way you look at pictures of car crashes.