Vampires in Sweden? Who knew?

Last night I was trying to decide between going to bed early and watching a movie, and settled on the movie. I'd stumbled across what looked like an unusual and potentially interesting one on Netflix - a Swedish horror film called "Let the Right One In." It was available to watch instantly, so I got my fuzzy robe on and settled in to give it a try. Now, I know what you're thinking: "Wow, she spends her Saturday nights in a fuzzy bathrobe, watching movies with subtitles? This chick has got it goin' ON! I have GOT to hang out with her!" Get in line.

I'm a sucker for a good scary movie. And I'm fascinated by legends and myths of fairies, werewolves, vampires, and other things that "go bump in the night". The problem is, these kinds of stories have been told so many times it's hard to find one with a truly fresh and original perspective. (If anyone sitting here reading this is thinking, "Um, what about 'Twilight'? - smack yourself in the head. Hard.) Anyway, the cover art of this Swedish movie promised me "A vampire tale like no other" and said it would be "mesmerizing". Sounded cool to me.

Here's the lowdown: 12-year-old Oskar is an outcast, bullied by his classmates, with no friends and no one who understands him. Enter Eli, the girl who moves in next door with an older man one is led to believe is her grandfather or some other such relative. Oskar and Eli slowly become friends, and she helps Oskar stand up to the kids making his life miserable. Oh, yeah...along the way he finds out she's a vampire who's responsible (directly and indirectly) for several murders in and around their small village.

The movie itself felt like almost all of the other foreign films I've seen: plenty of silences, punctuated only by panoramic stretches of bleak and depressing landscapes. Characters who do nothing but stare off into space for inordinately long periods of time with vacant expressions on their faces. Characters who wear horrifically mismatched clothes and look like they cut their hair with a weed whacker. Tiny, cramped kitchens filled with dishes and utensils so old and dingy you'd think anyone eating off them would wind up in the hospital on a ventilator. But I digress...

What surprised me about this movie wasn't the movie itself, but the reviews on Netflix posted by other people. One in particular stood out to me: "It's a touching story about loneliness and falling in love with someone who fills the hole in your heart. I was moved beyond my ability to articulate it into words."

When I finished the movie I went back to Netflix and re-read this review and some of the others that echoed its sentiments. After I finished shaking my head in dumbfounded amazement, I checked myself in the mirror for a second head or something. Because "love story" was NOT what I took away from this movie AT ALL. I wondered if I was the only one who saw it differently - if maybe my overly-developed sense of cynicism had finally gotten the better of me.

When I looked at Eli, I didn't see a sweet, innocent "girl" who is merely lonely and looking for a friend who will accept her for who and what she is. I saw a manipulator and a user. By the end of the movie it becomes clear that the older man she lives with has been with her for a long, LONG time - perhaps since he was Oskar's age. He sacrifices himself to feed her hunger, and she watches him plummet to his death without the slightest trace of emotion on her face. I viewed her growing "friendship" with Oskar as nothing more than a screening process - a way for her to figure out if he would be a suitable replacement for the man who, up until he almost got caught, had taken care of her and done all her dirty work. Eli's encouraging Oskar to stand up to the bullies at his school seemed like "priming the pump" of his latent violent tendencies. She would need Oskar to find and dispatch victims for her, just as the old man had before him. Why should she risk getting caught when she can manipulate someone else into committing murder for her? The one and only time she gets upset at someone's death is when she's forced to do the deed herself because the old man screwed up.

I was completely floored that the reviewers chose to overlook the obvious signs of sociopathy and narcissism in these characters. If people think "Let The Right One In" is a love story, then I sure would like to know what their definition of a dysfunctional relationship is!

Though the more important question probably is, why did I spend all this time blogging about an obscure, mediocre foreign film that no one else I know will probably ever see? I guess I'm just cool like that.