One Paragraph Movie Review: Let the Right One In

Three hundred and twenty-second film: Let the Right One In, the most heart-warming vampire movie you’ll ever see. A Swedish film made in 2008, you’d think all the takes on vampires would have been done to death, but this is fresh, gorgeous, and sad. It focuses on its themes instead of sharpened fangs, exploring alienation, loneliness, love, teen angst, bullying, gender fluidity, and an unquenchable thirst for blood. Just so, so much blood, all in a snowy Nordic environment. Though fangless, this thing still includes a mass of vampire tropes — sunlight sensitivity, the need to be invited in, a brief dalliance with a mirror — but does it all with such quiet style and desolate calm that you barely even notice that you’ve fallen in love with a couple of tweens who want to murder people. There are some absolutely stand-out visual scenes — the cat scene, the two hospital room scenes, and the stunningly brutal pool scene — that stick in your brain like a stake through the heart, and that you want to talk to other people about. Five borrowed Rubik’s cubes out of five.