Let the Right One In is a moody, Bergmanesque slice of Scandinavian existential dread. Evocative cinematography becomes the psychological backdrop on which is painted a vampire tale that is so much more than a horror movie. And yet, the greatest influence that director Tomas Alfredson wields over the cinematic telling of John Ajvide Lindqvist’s novel has nothing to do with how the movie looks. Indeed, it is somewhat difficult to pin down with any certain exactitude just where the influence is found.
It is a little recognized fact that almost every great performance in a film by a child actor is at least fifty percent the work of the director. Children can emote well enough, but to get to the point of being truly affecting in that emoting requires all the multiple tricks of the trade involved in filmmaking. The two kids at the center of this story—Oskar and Eli—are difficult roles to handle and casting must be near-perfect to be bring their story to a fully complementary position with the source novel upon which it is based. This is especially true of Eli who is not really a kid at all, but a vampire that has been trapped in a kid’s body for even longer than Dick Clark.
To the point: the brilliance of this film comes down to its acting and the acting comes down to a perfect blending of raw talent and directorial manipulation. If there is one single image from the film that has attained an iconic level above all else, it would almost certainly be Eli’s enormous luminous eyes. Lina Leandersson was born with an incredible pair of eyes, but Alfredson is the person charged with making those eyes such an important and essential element of the movie’s success. Eli’s eyes become significant to the storytelling because they are windows into an old soul that is, by turns, tortured, tender, vengeful, and manipulative. That is a lot to demand even from an adult actress who has been making movies for decades. Putting that weigh entirely upon a young, untried actress is a big gamble and only a director assured that he can do what the actress can’t would even make the effort.
Many scenes in the film dependent upon framing and staging. An excellent example showing how important this can be to delivering a memorable performance is found in Anthony Hopkins’ performances as Hannibal Lecter. Only once was Hopkins nominated for an Oscar for playing the Cannibal and, in fact, he managed to win Best Actor despite being on-screen less than half the time of his co-star, Jodie Foster. It is not as if Hopkins suddenly stopped remembering how to play Lecter, so why it is that hardly anyone recalls much of his other performances, but the Lecter he assayed in Silence of the Lambs has become so iconic? It is because of Jonathan Demme’s direction. Demme’s direction from the beginning situates Lecter as a mysteriously monstrous figure. Half the Best Actor Oscar that Hopkins received for the film should go to Demme because it is a textbook example of a performance that is only half about the acting while the other half is about the directing.
Such is the case with the performances of the young actors playing Oskar and Eli. More so than the moody cinematography, the long shots of Oskar and his bullies, and the creepy pacing of the film, the exemplification of directorial influence over the adaptation is found in the performances which, almost amazingly, bring completely to life the seemingly unfilmable depths of the characters as conceived in the novel.
