The Fundy Film Society

Let the Right One In

Swedish director Tomas Alfredson weaves friendship, rejection and loyalty into a disturbing, darkly atmospheric, yet unexpectedly tender tableau of adolescence. Based on John Ajvide Lindqvist’s best-selling novel it tells the story of a bullied 12-year-old boy who develops a friendship with a vampire child in a suburb of 1980s Stockholm. Alfredson, unfamiliar with the horror and vampire genres, decided to tone down many elements of the novel and focus primarily on the love-story between the two main characters. The young actors were selected through a yearlong process of open castings held across Sweden. The film received widespread international critical acclaim winning 56 awards and additional nominations.

This lucid indie gem, directed with imagination and restraint, releases the vampire movie from overwrought conventions, offering instead a coolly balanced and utterly compelling examination of alienation and love. Lit like a Renaissance painting, it is, in the basest of terms, a horror flick. But it’s also a spectacularly moving and elegant movie, and to dismiss it into genre-hood, to mentally stuff it into the horror pigeonhole, is to overlook a remarkable film.

Special Double Bill with Pontypool. 6-packs do not apply, no single tickets, 2 for $10.