Let the Right One In- Movie Review

The news of a remake/ readaptation of Let The Right One In intersected neatly with my local video place getting the movie to rent on Blu Ray, so I decided to give it a whirl. There are few times when I see an adaptation of a novel and come out of it thinking the movie was better, but this might be one of them.

The script was written by the author of the original novel. When I first heard this I thought it could lead to a bloated movie that tries to include absolutely everything from the book, but thankfully that's not the case at all. Lindqvist went through his story with an critical and un-biased eye and took out the side stories that sometimes dragged the book down, making more room for the central relationship between Eli and Oskar. What we get is a streamlined, faster version of the original with a lot of the waffle cut out.

I do have some complaints I'd like to get out of the way here. Unfortunately some quality material got cut out as well, such as nearly all of Hakan's characterization and backstory. The book's Hakan was a complex character who we got to see battling against his darker impulses and struggling to keep his action rooted in good intentions, no matter how delusional the attempt was, whereas I can imagine people seeing the movie version and coming away with the impression that he's quite a fatherly figure towards Eli, in which case they're in for quite a shock if they read the book.

Eli and Oskar also lose some complexity. The actors portraying them do a fine job, but we just don't get into their heads as much as in the book. Subsequently Oskar isn't nearly as creepy at the start as he was originally, and some of the more humerous scenes between him and Eli unfortunately aren't included.

The cinematography of the film is amazing from the outset and just keeps getting better, producing some real "holy crap" moments using plain old lighting techniques and camera angles rather than specia effects (the one exception being an extremely cool sequence involving Eli's eyes)

My overall impression of the movie is that everybody involved did not set out to make a vampire movie, but a romance film that just happens to feature a vampire. This is most noticable in the (extremely good) soundtrack, which could just as easily be used in a "normal" coming-of-age drama.