Thursday 15 April 2010

LET THE RIGHT ONE IN

dMYD DVD
Starring Swedish Actors You’ve Never Heard Of
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZJUgsZ56vQ

Y

Essentially Twilight from a parallel reality where filmmakers don’t hate you, this charm-oozing paint-poem of a movie is casually designed to probe the stranger questions of human connection through an inhuman, blood-drenched lens. The only half decent vampire revision since Joss Whedon was fictional king, here the overused haemoglobin enthusiasts are smacked down into a brutally realistic evocation of empty small town Europe in the late 70s, swathes of white and grey illustrating the drab nothingness that little Oskar has to trudge through on his way to a big, pointless school. However, the startling crimson injection of its dentally-challenged heroine changes the whole make-up of the piece, chucking questions of morality, love and monstrosity around like other horror films flick entrails. Child acting has always been a mine-field of am-dram mumble-a-thons battling screaming balloons of Daddy’s money, so it’s refreshing to discover that here it’s the kids who should quickly write up a new contract to never work with idiots or adults, deftly combining silent restraint with nanoseconds of heartfelt glances and reactions. The two leads almost single-handedly deliver a subtle treatise on the beauty and horror of naivety, aided and abetted by quiet support and a delicate, reverent script, never obvious but always sincere. Daringly ambiguous, touching and macabre, it also has the benefit of feeling very little like anything that’s come before, barring a psychotic breakdown on a school trip to Helsinki. In love. Run fast to the internet and watch it now before the inevitable Americana remake, an infinitely more soul-crushing prospect; nothing alive in the next year will be more terrifying than Miley and Billy Ray gothing up in order to teach us all how to be a little more ‘human’. Gee. And Shucks.

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