Let The Right One in is delicate poetry
“Let the Right one in” is one of those rare movies which leave such an indelible impression on you that it doesn’t let you move on. It doesn’t leave you long after you have watched the movie. Some rare cinema achieve having an altogether different medium of expression. The silences and the stills, the languor of movement and lack of speech. True communication is when you don’t say a thing. Let the Right one in is a movie which is eloquent in its silences. It’s a film where you hear the sounds that you otherwise don’t.
There has been a lot of hallowed, celebrated, ultra famed movies on love. Yet, minus all the paraphernalia, without the outward veneer, at the heart, somehow love is mostly superficial. The integrity of love and its heart and innocence is often absent or lost behind the stardom and the melodrama. Let the Right One in is a movie where there’s love minus all the paraphernalia. True love is when, to say I love you, You don’t have to say. Love or for that matter any true friendship, is about being there for the other person in his/her moment of need. To stand by the person you love, through testing times. Not to rejoice during the luxuriance but to be the hand to hold out in the cold, lost in the mountains, asunder in the desert. True love or true friendship is to be there, when there’s no one else. Let the Right One in is everything that a “Casablanca” or a “Roman Holidays” attempts to be, and they are not at its core. It’s also exactly the movie that Twilight failed to be.
Let the Right one in, ironically, is not even about two human beings. It’s the story about tender friendship and innocent love between a 12 year old boy Oskar and 12 year old Elli, the vampire girl who’s been 12 years for last 200 years. Yet, despite being a so called Vampire movie, it transcends the Vampire genre, becomes a poignant love story, a human story of strife and triumph, of survival and death.
Rare is a film which truly captures the tender feelings of a battered and lonely 12 year old. The emotional and physical hurts and voids. Elli teaches Oskar to stand up to his fears, to retaliate, to fight and she turns up for Oskar at his greatest moment of need.
The movie just feels too delicate. It’s so tender that you fear how brutally the Hollywood remake might kill it. It’s an extremely rare movie that breaks love and human relationship analytically down to its bare kernel and shows it in the most tender form. It’s a movie so delicate, it’s untouchable. Written by John Ajvide Lindqvist and directed by Tomas Alfredson, it’s a phenomenal movie, the kind of which testifies that world cinema is still breathing.
It’s a so called horror movie, a vampire movie, but beneath the vampire genre and its macabre setting, it’s a movie of human relationships, about most tender human feelings, about the most beautiful thing in this world – childhood and its innocence. It’s a movie about childhood, about growing up and coming of age. Like true work of art, this movie is one of those which can’t be re-created. It will touch you, leave you moist. A rare gem, watch it and fall in love.
Tags: Let the right one in
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
It’s a mind blowing movie that I put in my top 10 movies list for last year…this was something refreshingly unexpected…after having seen those done to death vampire movies of Hollywood, I thought it will be the European underworld or European van helsing…but it turned out to be the biggest surprise of my life…
(spoiler) This movie is like no other I’ve ever seen. I went into watching this (on netflix instant) without knowing anything about it, except Kashyap had spoken about it in his interview with MTV Iggy. Since I knew nothing there was a point I went “whaaaa?” when becomes apparent she is a vampire. That’s when I broke out of the realistic atmosphere the beginning had created into the imaginative. This film goes in the same category as Battle Royale for me: for the imaginative terror born out of childlike innocent whimsy.
Hey Sriram, not just the vampire bit, even in the start itself, the guy who stays with the girl (possibly the father) is shown killing people for blood. Later when they are in the house, you realize everything. I like simple movies though, but this one was good. But why that guy threw acid upon himself I couldnt understand. The girl “climbing” up to the guy’s room in the hospital was quite amazing. When the guy’s face is shown, my wife shut off the movie.
the guy is not her father. she wud have befriended him just like she befriends oskar. remember the scene where at nite when the old man goes out to get blood, he asks her not to see the boy ?
I don’t think that was acid. That must’ve been holy water from a church somewhere
I watched it thinking it was an english movie, but as movie unfolded, it leaves mark on your soul.
I guess the movie still has not got it,s due.
One of the most beautiful films I ever seen. I guess I saw this film last December. A British colleague of mine gave this huge collection of slasher movies (Dust Devil, Pin, Der Toderskin, Feed. Inside etc). Some of them were good some of them were absolute trash. He never mentioned anything about Let the right one in. Now when I started the film, I had absolutely no clue what was in store for me. I was expecting just another B grade slasher movie. And BOY was I wrong! What unfolded in front of me for the next couple of hours is sheer poetry. Come to think of it, LTROI is just the story of a kid being bullied around and finds this one friend who protects him. But what layers! Beautiful.
I am glad that more and more ppl are watching it after Anuraag mentioned it in his interviews. But I suggest watch it with open mind without prior expectations. Dont let Anuraag or mine or Subhashish’s enthusiasm kill this movie for you.
(Anecdote: sometime around last year I discovered Fatih Akin through some DVD which was gifted to me. This was all before Anuraag or others mentioned in PFC. Now being the kind of genius that Fatih Akin is I suggested his movies to lot of my friends. But I think I hyped their expectations way beyond reasonable limits. They never got hooked on to Fatih the way I got hooked on to. The purpose of this anecdote is : Dont let our enthusiasm towards a movie, kill it for you! Go with an open mind and enjoy the poetry)
I saw it last night! I am speechless! What a powerful film.But I am a lil bit disappointed with your post being so small. Such films need some more analysis, more of your reactions and stuff. But I am glad someone brought it up here. Cool!
There are other posts as well on this movie.