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Created Dec 17, 2011 02:34AM PST • Edited Jan 02, 2012 05:33PM PST

1. Quality

2. Summary

   Great 4.0

   Downright charming, this vampire movie. It’s also loads of fun, freshly exploiting well known vampire conventions while delivering enough gross-outs to trigger a handful of yucks and well earned laughs.

   Vampires aside, Let the Right One In achieves real distinction as a perfect evocation of a troubled boy’s life: his single Mom, remote Dad, friendless existence. A prettyboy, he likes girls but gets badly bullied, until a friend enters his life. She happens to be a vampire, which helps – a lot. The My Bodyguard story can thus be taken as a paean to the value of friends, especially those who help a kid stick-up for himself.

   Stately and often still, Tomas Alfredson’s film nonetheless delivers with such verve its Swedish director became an international sensation. The acclaim led to him directing the very British Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Brilliant!

4. Acting

   Very Good 3.5

   The child stars are mostly impassive, and thus less impressive than their antagonists.

   • The bully, his posse and his big brother brilliantly display the mix of aggression, fear and rectitude common to adolescent boys.
   • Their adult counterparts naturally display a mix of townie tribalism and drunkenness.

   The single mother of the bullied boy and his remote father are well drawn, she an upbeat presence at her wits-end raising a young man, he a carefree dude who fits in his son around the edges of his partying life.

5. Male Stars Very Good 3.5

6. Female Stars Very Good 3.5

7. Female Costars Great 4.0

8. Male Costars Great 4.0

10. Film

    Great 4.0

    Silent for the first two and a half minutes, Tomas Alfredson’s film goes on to use stillness as an effective technique in several settings. For instance, the bullied boy gets held underwater for a long minute while tremendous violence occurs on the deck. Alfredson keeps his camera on the squirming boy below the surface as it becomes increasingly clear that major happenings are occurring above. Brilliant.

    Alfredson, working from John Ajvide Lindqvist’s script, pays off several well known vampire tropes with great verve, damn near generating admiring LOLs after several. Big fun.

    They also invent some new vampire conventions, including the capturing and bleeding of human victims. The banality of vamprism?

    Finally, the film gets great mileage from simple stunts and effects, proving that great filmmaking doesn’t require a great budget. Hell, there’s nary a fang to be seen.

11. Direction Great 4.0

12. Play Great 4.0

13. Music Great 4.0

14. Visuals Great 4.0
15. Content

16. Edge

    Sordid 2.6

    Sufficiently gruesome to qualify as a horror flick, though the realistic schoolyard bullying creates the scariest parts of the movie. From a sexuality POV, the quick glimpse of a vampire’s privates proves she’s telling the truth about not being a girl.

17. Sex Innocent 1.5

18. Violence Savage 3.7

19. Rudeness Profane 2.6

21. Reality

    Supernatural 3.5

22. Circumstantial Surreal 2.4

23. Biological Fantasy 4.5

24. Physical Supernatural 3.5