Let the Right One In
Sweden 2007
Starring: Kåre Hedebrant, Lina Leandersson
Director: Tomas Alfredson
Tony Manero
Chile 2008
Starring: Alfredo Castro, Paola Lattus
Director: Pablo Larrain
Fifty Dead Men Walking
UK/Canada 2008
Starring Jim Sturgess, Ben Kingsley
Director: Kari Skogland
NOT since Ingmar Bergman’s heyday has a Swedish film been so enthusiastically received by worldwide critics as teenage vampire chiller Let the Right One In. Leading horror movie expert Kim Newman reckons the film “can stand toe-to-toe with” Victor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), Guillermo Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) and Jean Cocteau’s Orphee (1950) among fantasy classics.
That’s praise indeed, which could well result in the kind of breakout art-house success recently enjoyed by such foreign fare as The Lives of Others – although the occasionally stomach-churning special effects may prove a stumbling block. And while it’s always encouraging to see subtitled movies in the spotlight, there’s a danger that excessive hype will ultimately lead to disappointment for those expecting to be blown away by a masterpiece. This is because, while director Tomas Alfredson deserves commendation for coming up with such an offbeat enterprise, his ambitious mixing-up of genres and tones doesn’t quite come off.
At its core, this is a tale of teenage bullying set in suburban Sweden in 1982. But there’s also a throat-slitting killer on the loose – who, in one of the early scenes, is shown rather incompetently going about his bloody business. Then there’s the unusual friendship which develops between the murderer’s ward Eli (Lina Leandersson), a long-haired kid of ambiguous gender who looks about 12, and his next-door neighbour Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant), a kid who is being picked on mercilessly by his schoolmates. Our weakling hero dreams of revenge and his new pal reveals supernatural abilities which could assist in this regard. It wouldn’t be fair to specify those talents here – suffice to say that Alfredson and Jon Ajvide Lindqvist, adapting the latter’s well-regarded young adults’ novel (its title borrowed obliquely from Morrissey’s song “Let the Right One Slip In”), ring some new changes on long-established horror tropes.
In the process, however, they don’t seem to have quite thought through their political subtexts. The contrast between the protagonist’s chalk-white skin and the swarthy features and black hair of his “newcomer” neighbour is clearly no accident; likewise the chronological setting, just as Sweden was starting to welcome significant numbers of Muslim refugees; Then there’s the way the throat-slitting murders share common features with the way halal animal-slaughter is performed. Is this all intended to be some kind of parable of immigration and integration? Who knows?
What is certain is that this isn’t by any means a children’s film. But, with its concentration on such youthful characters, Let the Right One In (soon to be remade in America by Matt “Cloverfield” Reeves under the auspices of the newly-revived Hammer Films) isn’t exactly aimed at adults either. Alfredson also wrong-foots us by at times adopting a larkish, blackly-comic approach, then elsewhere opting for a more reflective, poetic mood.
The latter tendency serves to bog the narrative flow down somewhat and a little trimming wouldn’t have gone amiss. But the climax, when it finally arrives, proves worth the wait: wittily spooky, satisfyingly bloodthirsty, and, in a sly coda, unexpectedly poignant.
Bizarrely, Let the Right One In isn’t the only recent release to be set three decades ago, feature the exploits of a serial killer, deploy genre/thriller tropes to explore political and social issues, arrive on the back of some over-generous praise gleaned from an award-laden tour of the world’s film festivals and nobly fail in its aims of turning an audaciously bold conceit into a coherent and satisfying movie.
However, whereas Alfredson’s picture plunges us into the icebox of a nordic winter at the apex of Sweden’s welfare-state social liberalism, Pablo Larrain’s Tony Manero evokes the fetid heat of Pinochet-era Santiago. It’s the second film from writer-director Larrain (after 2006’s comparatively little-seen Fuga), who shares screenplay credit with Mateo Iribarren and his star Alfredo Castro. The latter is grubbily convincing as the reptilian
40-something Raul Peralta, a dead ringer for Al Pacino who also bears a passing resemblance to legendary Italian horror director Dario Argento.
One person Raul does not look anything like is a young John Travolta – but that doesn’t stop him from entering a television talent contest in which ordinary people impersonate celebrities – in his case, the Tony Manero character played by Travolta in the film Saturday Night Fever. This implausible set-up would be enough for most directors, but Larrain ups the ante by making Raul not merely a delusional obsessive, but also a sociopathic murderer who resorts to homicidal violence with minimal provocation.
We follow Raul’s progress with a bemused, horrified fascination – the irony being that Pinochet’s repressive, paranoid police state (supported by the United States, as we now know) proves, with its emphasis on political crimes, such an ideal playground for a discreet, ordinary-looking murderer.
The blackest of nightmarishly black comedies, Tony Manero is executed with a chilly detachment – the influence of Belgium’s Dardenne brothers is evident – and a careful attention to period detail that creates a suitably suffocating atmosphere of dread. Nevertheless, in the end, this isn’t quite enough to distract us from the overriding air of gimmicky cleverness or the story’s essential implausibilities – so that the film, like its protagonist, ultimately falls short of realising its goals.
Although currently far from a household name, 27-year-old Jim Sturgess has quietly established himself as perhaps the next big thing in British cinema. Two of his recent efforts – Beatles-inspired musical Across the Universe (2007) and Las Vegas-set drama 21 (2008) over-performed significantly at the box-office and now he’s landed a potentially star-making role in gritty Ulster-set thriller Fifty Dead Men Walking. But while he’s appealingly genial and charismatic in a tricky role (think Colin Farrell meets a young David Morrissey with a touch of Jake Gyllenhaal thrown in), he’s ill-served by his choice of material.
Based on the bestselling memoir by Martin McGartland (who has reportedly disowned this adaptation – “Why did the filmmakers feel it necessary to turn my story on its head?”), it’s the tale of a Catholic petty-criminal/wheeler-dealer recruited off the scruffy streets of late-1980 West Belfast by the RUC as an informer (“tout” in the local vernacular). Martin’s cocky charm and natural braggadocio (“I’m not like anyone else”) helps him to infiltrate the IRA under the avuncular guidance of his “handler” Fergus, played by Ben Kingsley with an eye-catching hairpiece and an accent seemingly modelled on Jim “Bullseye” Bowen.
The tumultuous atmosphere of the time and place is quite effectively recreated but the dialogue is often clunky. “You’re not a man unless you’ve got a cause.” “The price of a conscience is death – none of us can afford it.”
Crucially, we don’t really get much sense of Martin’s moral dilemma or what leads him to “cross over” to the other side. And, as can often happen with movies based on autobiographies, the tone is excessively self-justifying, self-serving and self-congratulatory.
Writer-director Kari Skogland’s slick, over-stylised approach, meanwhile, is distractingly flashy and attention-seeking: full of saturated colours and noisy scoring, along with hyper-kinetic camerawork and editing.
The results give the distinct impression of a project intended as a stepping-stone to a mainstream Hollywood enterprise. Stateside precursors Serpico, Donnie Brasco and GoodFellas come to mind at various junctures. But such comparisons are emphatically not to the advantage of an overlong film whose cumbersome title refers to the individuals supposedly “saved” by what the end titles refer to as the protagonist’s “heroic work”.
Neil Young
