Movie Review - "Let the Right One In" ("Låt den rätte komma in")

"Let the Right One In" ("Låt den rätte komma in") is without a doubt the best low-budget Swedish pre-teen vampire flick that I have ever seen.

Given that introduction, this next sentence won't be a surprise: it's kind of a strange movie. If I had to compare it to other movies, I'd say that it's "My Life As A Dog" meets "Salem's Lot". If you've seen both of those movies, you know what a strange mix that would be. (BTW, I haven't seen "Twilight", so I really can't give you a head-to-head comparison with this year's big-budget American pre-teen vampire flick. )

Overall, I really liked it and it's going to stick with me. There are some wonderfully strange and beautiful visuals in it. Those scenes are interspersed with some pretty gruesome and bloody scenes. And the day-to-day life of the boy at the heart of it is every bit as horrific as the vampire stuff in some ways. I won't say much about the story, so as not to give anything away, because figuring it all out is part of what made watching this movie fun. But there are some wonderfully haunting images and plot points.

It's the best scary movie that I've seen in a long time. Make it a late-night rental and curl up on the couch with somebody warm. It'll make an excellent Halloween rental for folks when that season comes around.

(Foreign Flick Note: Monique and I watched it in Swedish with English subtitles, but our Blu-Ray disk also had a dubbed English-language version. In fact, the disk defaulted to the English-language dubbing, but we generally prefer to watch foreign movies in the original language if the subtitling is decent, which it was.)