Let the Right One in

These days it takes a very special vampire movie to stand out. Like 'Twilight', the Swedish film 'Let the Right One In' is a love story between a human and a vampire but there the resemblance ends. 'Let the Right One In' is not a romantic fantasy but combines the supernatural with social realism. Set on a housing estate in the suburbs of Stockholm in the early 1980s, it's the story of Oskar, a lonely, bullied child, who makes friends with Eli, the girl in the next apartment. 'Oskar, I'm not a girl,' she tells him and she's not kidding. They forge a relationship which is oddly innocent yet disturbing, two outsiders against the rest of the world. But one of these outsiders is, effectively, a serial killer. While 'Let the Right One In' is startlingly original, it nevertheless couldn't have existed without the near century of vampire cinema that preceded it.