Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattison discover that love means never having to say “femoral artery.”
remain as unsettling and elusive as Eli. To my mind, ambiguity is preferable. Like Oskar, we can’t divine the adult world in this matter, so we just accept it and try to make some sense of it. Most critics misinterpreted the role completely, by my reading—some refer to him as Eli’s father, which doesn’t compute. Håkan’s role and fate are clearly dire, and it casts a dark shadow over what most audience members perceive as a budding romance between Oskar and Eli. By the final image, one cannot help but wonder if little Oskar is just the next in what might already be a long line of Eli’s facilitators, doomed to grow old as she remains eternally 12 and to struggle with tending to her needs and appetites as best they can. There are all kinds of love. This does not make LET THE RIGHT ONE IN inherently a better film than TWILIGHT, per se, though the Swedish film is the underdog currently capturing the fancy of genre connoisseurs, many of whom are sadly quick to snobbishly dismiss and/or avoid TWILIGHT. Both films have their self-evident weaknesses: TWILIGHT overindulges the kinetics of 21st century superheroic action and iconography at a few points (it’s hot-and-heavy urgency is, to my mind, among its key virtues and not a detriment), while LET THE RIGHT ONE IN is rendered laugh- out-loud risible at one point when we are shown how cats respond to vampires (and a silly pack of CGI felines they are at that). But I am intent upon the virtues of these films, not their flaws—these are
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terrific films well worth seeing, preferably with an au- dience in a theater, as cinema is best experienced. I don’t care what the generally shared consen- sus is, particularly among the self-appointed genre mavens. Yes, Tomas Alfredson has made a mar- velous movie from John Ajvide Lindqvist’s novel, his third directorial effort and the first to enjoy international recognition. Kudos! But Catherine Hardwicke is a great contemporary filmmaker, TWILIGHT is absolutely in synch with her body of work, and it’s a perfect synthesis of inspired individual director and pop culture phenomenon. That such a lucky pairing of individual voices (Hardwicke, Meyer) and cultural zeitgeist results in mainstream blockbuster status shouldn’t de- value the work itself, any more than the relative paucity of mainstream acknowledgement or ac- ceptance of LET THE RIGHT ONE IN should ar- tificially lend any perceived subcultural cache to that film. Both TWILIGHT and LET THE RIGHT ONE IN are beautifully conceived, crafted and ex- ecuted horror films in their own right, and that alone is worthy of attention and applause. The timing of the publication of their source novels and theatrical release of their film adapta- tions weds them as ideal companions—an im- perfect but quite lovely couple holding their own in a blind, indifferent, potentially lethal and even maliciously stupid world.
And isn’t that, after all, what these novels and films are really about?
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