Now this blog came about because at the start of the year my friend Nick and I decided that we should mark every film we see at the cinema a score out of 10 and come years end we should look back at our ratings and decide what we consider to be the bets movie of 2014. It seemed like a fun idea, however I also had a pile of DVD's I'd just been lent or bought for myself of never-seen-before films and I decided to give them a mark out of 10 too. Before long I realised that I had seen more movies than days of the year had gone past and that gave me a rather interesting, and incredibly stupid, challenge- to try and watch a film for every day of the year.
Yep so that's 365 movies that I plan on watching in 2014. Now this sounded like something fun, but something that I'd ultimately give up on after a couple of weeks, but I am writing this on the 27th of January and I've already seen 36 films, so surprisingly I have kept this going thus far. I told a friend of mine about my crazy idea and he suggested I create a blog, so here we are.
Anyway on to the first film!
A Film a Day
Day 1- Let the Right One In
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Director- Tomas Alfredson
Year- 2008
What is it?- Critically acclaimed Swedish vampire movie in which young bullied boy Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant) befriends Eli (Lina Leandersson), a girl who's recently moved next door to him who may be more than she seems.
Why did I watch it?- From the minute I first saw Chow Yun-Fat wielding two pistols in the opening scene to John Woo's seminal classic The Killer I instantly became a fan of world cinema and love 'discovering' foreign films that I can introduce my friends to. Even if such 'discovering' simply involves reading lists (yep, me and lists again!) of the best foreign-language movies, which is how I came to learn of Let the Right One In. I bought the DVD of this film a few months back, but for whatever reason had never got round to watching it till this month. This was mainly because I have to be in the right mood for horror movies and the film's famous image of young girl covered in blood made me believe that this would be quite an ordeal to watch. It wasn't.
My thoughts- To steal a line from Zoolander, vampire's "are so hot right now" with True Blood, Vampire Diaries and the Twilight 'saga' all being big modern hits. It's been over a hundred and fifteen years since Bram Stoker's literary classic Dracula was first published and over ninety years since silent German expressionist film Nosferatu popularised the concept of the modern vampire and introduced many of the lores and we still can't get enough of the blood-sucking creatures of the night.
Let the Right One In (based on a 2004 book by John Ajvide Lindqvist, who wrote the film's screenplay and helped oversee the whole project) differs from your typical vampire film by focusing on its characters rather than go for cheap thrills and blood-splattered scenes. That's not to say there isn't blood, indeed one of the first scenes has Hakan (Per Ragnar), an older man who Eli has moved to the neighbourhood with, that is not her father as you might first suspect, murdering a passerby in a bungled attempt to drain his blood for Eli, it's just that the childhood-love story between the two children takes centre stage.
Oskar's parents have long since separated, his Father has moved out and despite one scene showing them brushing their teeth together his Mother seems distant. His school days mostly involve trying to hide between lessons from a trio of bullies and his home life consists of keeping newspaper cuttings of crime stories he reads and visualising a brutal revenge of his school tormentors. Eli is if anything is even more isolated. Confined to her house during the daytime (for obvious reasons), her only companion is the aforementioned Hakan who she relies on for providing shelter and blood, but who is becoming more and more careless and reckless in his attempts to secure the latter for her.
The film doesn't delve too deep into Hakan/Eli relationship unlike the book of the same name, but it doesn't require a great deal of suspicion to suspect that Hakan perhaps isn't simply motivated by goodwill and generosity of heart to help the young feminine Eli. So it makes the moment where she finds a true friend in Oskar, who says he doesn't care if she was a girl, or a boy, or something else all the more poignant. Pretty soon he is teaching her Morse code so they can communicate through their bedroom wall and in turn Eli is teaching him to stand up for himself against the bullies.
There is another subplot involving a desperate Eli, now alone due to Hakan being arrested after getting caught in the midst of an attempted murder, attacking random townspeople in need of blood and one of them Lacke (Peter Carlberg) attempting to to avenge his loved ones that climaxes in a pivotal scene which brings our two leads closer together, but also further apart as it becomes clear that Eli can no longer remain in town.
Our two leads, both aged 11, are superb in their roles here and it helps that they are both actually children as opposed to two twenty-somethings having to pretend they are teenagers like every American high school movie ever. The movie is beautifully shot contains imagery that will stay with you long after seeing it such as Eli's ascent up a hospital wall or the moment she enters Oskar's house uninvited (finally a film which explains what happens when a vampire breaks the 'need to be invited in' rule) in a scene which gives the movie and book its name. There's a moment shot underwater in a swimming pool near the end which is filmed with marvellous restraint by director Tomas Alfredson, proving the old adage that sometimes what you don't see can often be more effective.
All in all Let the Right One In is a tense movie that while it may not scare you it will get under your skin and make you think about it for a few days after. Besides some terrible looking CGI cats and a shot of a vampire's reflection in a mirror (which made my inner-geek quite irritated!) this is a film you should *ahem* definitely let in to your life. Oh and there's not a sparkling vampire in sight, so that's a plus.
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