In a Stockholm suburb lives Oskar, a 12-year old boy tortured by bullies and left socially dysfunctional by the divorce of his parents and the absence of a permanent father figure. He dreams of doing his tormentors in nightly and often carries a knife with him to his neighborhood playground, stabbing a tree and telling it to “squeal like a pig.”

One night he meets his new neighbor Eli, a 12-year-old girl whom he immediately becomes fascinated with. Oskar sees that she is lonely like himself and in an effort to befriend her, he offers her his Rubik’s Cube. The next time they meet, she presents him with the solved Cube and Oskar is completely hooked.

What Oskar doesn’t know at first, and eventually learns later, is that Eli is a 200-year-old trapped in a 12-year-old body. She’s a vampire. Though wise beyond a normal teenager’s years, she still carries the heart of a child and that is what draws Oskar in, and keeps her pedophile protector around to hunt up victims for Eli’s blood feasts.

After repeated failures to bring her blood and free her from her weakened, degenerate state, Eli’s guardian offers himself to her. She accepts his blood and kills him, preventing him from becoming a vampire like her. Left to fend for herself, Eli doesn’t know what else to do but continue to occupy the apartment next door to Oskar’s and hunt for fresh victims at night.

As she and Oskar become closer, she teaches Oskar how to live a freer life, how to defend himself, and what love is. Although the last is done inadvertently.

“Let the Right One” In is a vampire movie with all of the vampire cliches thrown in. But, that’s just the gimmick. What’s really being focused on in this movie are dark themes like abusive relationships, bullying, people trapped by love into dysfunctional relationships,… The line between right and wrong in Oskar’s world is fuzzy and not easily distinguished. He’s outside of everything, dwelling in the realm of freaks and exiles. That’s where Eli was able to come into his life and show him how to live a new way. They exchange roles, one becomes the master, the other the servant. And they change again. It happens all too often that people who are made into outcasts find comfort in engaging in destructive behavior and often seek the companionship of people who will feed off them and abuse them regularly, which is what we catch a glimpse of in this movie.

Though Oskar and Eli come to love each other and commit to being each other’s guardians, we never learn their fate. One of the best things about any movie, to me, is its power to provoke thought. “Let the Right One In” does just that, and I wholly recommend it if you’re not adverse to non-Hollywood flicks. This one’s Swedish, though it is being remade by Hollywood as I write this.

Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a release date for “Let the Right One In” scheduled in Japan. It may just appear at some point on the shelves of Tsutaya, but if you’re keen to see it soon, you know how to go about doing so.

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