I finally got a chance to see the Swedish vampire film Let the Right One In (Låt den rätte komma in, 2008), directed by Tomas Alfredson and based on the novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist. Several people told me they thought it was the best film of 2008. High praise that makes me think of my own favorites for the year, films like WALL-E, The Edge of Heaven, Tropic Thunder, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Persepolis, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, The Wrestler, Gomorrah, and Man on Wire. But after seeing Let the Right One In I have to concur with my friends; this film about a harassed 12-year-old boy who develops a crush on a strange “girl” gets top-shelf honors.

The “girl,” Eli, is actually a vampire who’s been 12-years-old for a very long time. Maybe 200 years. There are blink-and-you-miss it flashes of her that effectively disturb, and remind, the viewer that, yes, there’s an element of pedophilia here. But there is also an element of sexlessness and otherness to her. She kills people to survive.

The boy, Oskar, has been so emasculated by bullies that he too is a sexless misfit. He is also trying to survive and harbors murderous thoughts about his tormentors. As you might guess, Eli and Oskar develop a co-dependent relationship. They both need each other, at first, for company to stave of their respective forms of loneliness, but later for much more. And yet they are also very disconnected from each other thanks to that whole age and vampire issue.

The other denizens around them hardly fare better. Everyone in this film seems to be simultaneously dependent, and somehow removed, from someone else. Cold, quiet, snowy exteriors that show people alone and vulnerable ebb and flow with cramped and dirty interiors where people try to warm each other with company, cats, and booze.

The title comes from both that aspect of vampire lore that suggests vampires cannot enter your premise without an invitation and is also influenced by the lyrics from a Morrissey song (Let the Right One Slip In) that was first released in 1992. That song is not featured in the film, and would have been jarringly out of place – although since the film is set in 1982 I’ll concede that Morrissey, and specifically The Smiths, are certainly evocative of both that time and are good icons for vampire-loving goth culture in general. An American remake is already slated, with Cloverfield director Matt Reeves at the helm, and I’ll bet a lot more bands than just Morrissey’s will get crammed into that soundtrack as Hollywood panders to snag the coveted youth demographic.

Alfredson’s film does not pander to the youth demographic. One friend told me that “Let the Right One In is like Twilight for adults who read real books.” I’ve not seen or read Twilight, so I have no dog in this fight. I’m also for anything that gets kids to read books at all. So yay Twilight, as far as I’m concerned. But I will affirm that Let the Right One In is dense, accomplished, sophisticated, beautiful, disturbing, and sometimes quite funny. It also provoked a spirited conversation afterwards with a half-dozen others that revealed that we all had very different interpretations of the various subtexts that were being handled in the film.

The Cinematography by Hoyte Van Hoytema has justly won several awards and is full of visual poetry. Despite its supernatural themes, special effects are for the most part subdued and given a back-seat to Oskar’s character development. One companion griped that a memorable scene involving several cats was too obvious of a C.G.I. trick, but he was otherwise won over. As to a scene toward the end that involved a pool, everyone agreed; sheer genius.

I’ll try to word this carefully to avoid spoilers; the very last scene does a remarkable job of providing an asnwer to the question of how to bridge a seemingly impossible chasm, a baby step away from the isolation that pervades the film. Morse code is the umbilicol chord. IMDB trivia translates the gesture. But a question remains, one with more sides to figure out than a Rubic’s cube when you think of all the angles for whom it might apply: Who’s your daddy?