Let the Right One In

As a fan of international cinema, I've heard a lot about the Swedish romantic-horror movie Let the Right One In over the last couple of years. I've heard it was "the best movie of the year" "the best vampire movie ever" and many other things, but I gotta say, I didn't find it to be any of those things. I purposefully let the hype settle down on it before I checked it out, so that I wouldn't be swayed even a little bit by anything but the movie. Well, the two young leads are good enough, but the movie as a whole just kinda lays there like a bump on a log. I'm all for slow moving movies (Hou Hsiao-Hsien is one of my favorite filmmakers), but this one was just flat out boring.

It's a vampire movie, but with enough different about it to add some interest. Our androgynous vampire and "her" friend lead us through this slog of a story where essentially nothing that we couldn't see coming a mile away happens. I thought in the first 30 minutes or so that we're being set up for a slow moving movie, with some decent atmosphere. After 30 more minutes of nothing of interest coming onto my screen, I actually considered shutting it off. Glad I didn't, since the final 30 minutes or so are actually quite good. The poetic finale especially is well done, but it comes as too little too late. There are plenty of great foreign films out there, and this has been a great decade for foreign cinema making into the US, but I would not recommend Let the Right One In as a shining example of that fact.