Let the Right One In is a very strange little movie. On one hand, it’s a not too unusual vampire narrative (newcomer arrives in a small town, is only seen at night, people start dying, strange habits, suspicion, innocent is bitten and turns into vampire, friend of the bitten sets out to kill the vampire, confrontation), but that’s not what this movie is really about.

Oskar is 12 years old, his parents are divorced, and he’s bullied at school. He lives in the sort of snow-clogged Scandinavian suburb of brutalist brick buildings and nowhere to go that I remember from growing up in Norway a few years later, and dreams of violent revenge on his tormentors. It’s while he’s stabbing a courtyard tree with a knife, pretending it’s one of the bullies, that Eli shows up, a girl who looks to be about his age. She’s just moved in to the apartment next to his with a man who might be her father, and there’s something strange about her. For instance, she perches in high places and jumps down effortlessly, she can’t feel cold (she says she must have forgotten how to), and she tells him without prompting that she can’t be his friend.

Of course, they become friends, and then boyfriend and girlfriend, as it becomes more and more obvious that Eli isn’t a little girl at all, although, as she says, she is 12 years old, she’s just been 12 years old for a long time. Håkan, the man Eli lives with, is her companion of sorts, and tries to procure blood for her to drink, but he’s a bungling killer, and Eli needs to take things into her own hands.

It’s a very original story, or at least a very original mixing of several familiar and very different stories, and it works surprisingly well, the low-key coming of age love story punctuated by a few bursts of sometimes extreme and shocking violence, and the supernatural elements handled matter-of-factly.

Visually, it’s also well made, although the cinematography is not spectacular, there are plenty of visual details to take note of. The whole thing is largely shot with extremely shallow depth of field, at times it’s extreme enough that Eli’s huge eyes are in focus while everything below the middle of her nose is a blur. Shallow depth of field seems to be a trend in horror movies, possibly coming out of Japan, where bokeh has long been a place to hide the horrors, complimenting the more traditional darkness of American and European horror. Eli’s particularly often treated to being partially out of focus, as well as behind panes of uneven or frosted glass, underlining the insecurity about her slippery true identity.

There’s a lot to be analyzed in this movie, and it deserves it, but more than anything it’s a very well-made and engaging film. Personally, I can identify very strongly with Oskar, and I think most everyone who grew up in the 80s, especially in Scandinavia, at least knew someone like him. In general, the characters are strong and recognizable, from the benign dead-end neighbourhood drunks to the well-meaning teachers and detached parents. I’ve been there, or somewhere very much like it, and I only wish I had found a vampire girlfriend willing to kill for me.

I had fairly high hopes for Mirrors, a semi-remake of a Korean horror movie I haven’t seen, but which seems to not be that amazing. The concept of evil manifesting in mirrors is old and wide-spread in folklore, and it seems it would be fairly easy to do something low-key, creepy, and very effective with it.

I still think that’s the case, but this movie isn’t that. It starts out pretty ok, with a kaleidoscope mirror version of New York buildings, which turns them into chasms and claustrophobic boxes, with no apparent escape route. Kiefer Sutherland is an alcoholic ex-cop looking for work as a security guard, and he starts working the night shift at a burned-out old department store, where the mirrors are inexplicably clean and shiny, despite everything else beeting full of soot and suitably grungy.

There’s evil in the mirrors, of course, and although a few of the early ideas are good (there’s a handprint on the mirror, but it turns out to be on the inside, and be one of many, some of which are far up away from the floor), it soon turns to some standard-issue tortured ghosts stuff. There’s a wasted opportunity when Kiefer Sutherland looks at his face in the mirror and it goes weird and distorted, which could have been creepy (like the bathroom mirror sequence that’s only talked about, but still manages to be very scary, in The Mothman Prophecies), but just looks like a bad digital warp effect.

And then it goes downhill, because since Kiefer’s an ex-cop, he needs to investigate. And when people in mediocre horror movies start investigating, the movie is obligated to come up with explanations, and they are invariably too specific, too facile, and too obvious, and everything’s ruined. This time, it has to do with a nun who might have been schizophrenic, but maybe not, and some sort of psychiatric treatment (the place used to be a hospital, dontcha know), and then Kiefer needs to hold an elderly nun at gunpoint and then everything explodes.

And then, at the end, the movie blatantly rips off the ending of Silent Hill, which was a deeply flawed film, but still superior to this one in almost every way.

I still think there’s a good mirror horror movie to be made. But sadly, Mirrors has probably made that impossible for a few years. A wasted opportunity, especially for Aja, who had shown great promise with the The Hills Have Eyes remake a couple of years ago.

Parque vía apparently won the main prize at the 3 continents festival in Nantes, France, the Golden Montgolfière. That’s a pretty big deal, congratulations to everyone as usual. What’s even better is that Beto, the non-professional actor who plays the main role (also named Beto, and based on him), won the best actor award.