Let the Right One In

A twelve-year-old boy is bullied at school in a Stockholm suburb in 1982. A girl moves in next door, only comes out after dark, and is not twelve.

The romance reading is the popular one and the film keeps quietly undermining it. Eli travels with an adult man who kills people to feed her, and who is visibly worn out by the arrangement. Work out what he was when he met her and the last shot stops being sweet.

Tomas Alfredson shoots the snow and the concrete with total flatness, which makes the few violent moments land harder than any amount of staging would. The swimming pool sequence is filmed from underwater in one shot and is the best-directed scene in modern vampire cinema.

Two things to know. The Swedish original subtitles on the first Region 1 release were rewritten and much worse; make sure you have the theatrical translation. And the American remake, Let Me In, is very good, which almost never happens.