Sorry, forgot...
There Will Be Blood
I was brought up on horror films. I'd always try and stay up late on a Friday night to watch old black and white frighteners like Village of the Damned and The Birds and suchlike. Then as I grew up my mate David was the first person I knew to have a video recorder, and we'd get his mum to rent us films we weren't supposed to watch like Phantasm and [/i]The Evil Dead[/i]. Groovy.
Bearing all that in mind, I approached this month's film with a degree of relish. Tomas Alfredson's Let The Right One In, however, is nothing like any of those films from my youth. Adapted by John Adjvide Lindqvist from his own book and set in Sweden at the end of the Cold War, it introduces twelve-year-old Oskar, an outsider who's put upon by thugs at school and spends his time with his nose in a book learning Morse code and forensic science. Things change though when he gets new neighbours - Eli, a girl his age, and a man she says is her father. She's a *** fish - first time Oskar meets her she's standing atop an eight foot climbing frame from which she alights with an athlete's grace, and proceeds to zip through his Rubik's Cube like a dervish. Not as *** as her dad though - first time we see him he's abducting a teenager, hanging them from a tree, slitting him like a pig and draining his blood into the handy jug he carries around in his toolkit.
So far, so Hannah Nosferatu. This being no ordinary horror film, however, the plot centres not so much around the new arrivals' exsanguinating shenanigans and more on Oskar and Eli's burgeoning friendship. It's a braver young lad than I who can ask the same girl "Are you a vampire?" and "Do you want to go steady?", but ask he does. The answer to both, of course, is "Yes". This might all sound a bit Buffy and Angel, but nothing could be further from the truth. First of all, this is a work that looks astonishing. The cinematography feels like that of a landscape artist - ultrawide angles, no camera movement, broadly colourless, with the odd splash of red (obviously). The director pieces together a number of almost static tableaux, with sparse dialogue, like Waiting For Godot with an undercurrent of bloodlust. Even the scenes that you do expect from your average vampire movie are treated as incidental, over there, out of the corner of the director's eye.
A film to defy your expectations, Let The Right One In is not only the best horror film that I've seen in ages, it's the best film full stop. The penultimate scene in particular, when the bullies get their comeuppance, will take your breath away and have you rewinding the DVD to check what you just saw. You know precisely what's going to happen, but it's the how that marks Alfredson out as a very special talent. Watch it now before Hollywood gets hold if it.
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