Dashingly undead young men are popping their coffins in Alan Ball’s new HBO series “True Blood” and Catherine Hardwicke’s November movie, “Twilight.” But the most appealing vampire of the new season may well be the girl with the blood-smeared chin in Tomas Alfredson’s award-winning film “Let the Right One In” (Oct. 24). As played by a 12-year-old tyro named Lina Leandersson, she looks about as predatory as a kid who got into the jam jar again.
Set in a wintry Stockholm suburb where even the drunks look slightly marooned, “Let the Right One In” revolves around the budding attraction between a slender boy named Oskar, who is savagely bullied at school, and Ms. Leandersson’s Eli, his new neighbor in the apartment next door. Eli (pronounced Ellie) has some decidedly supernatural characteristics: She can scoot up the side of a multistory building in no time and appear and disappear with the suddenness of teleportation. She doesn’t feel the cold, so when she first turns up outdoors as Oskar works his Rubik’s Cube (she wants to work it too), she’s coatless and barefoot.
Mr. Alfredson found Ms. Leandersson after a series of open auditions, but because her voice was still girlishly high, he used another young Swedish actress with a lower register to dub her lines. This does nothing to detract from Ms. Leandersson’s performance because her dialogue is sparse and her character is largely defined by her physicality. She evokes Eli’s radical apartness with an air of watchful caution and a contained stillness of body that not only belies her childish appearance but makes it all the more startling when we see her in a single long shot leaping on a victim’s shoulders.
Da The New York Times, 7 Settembre 2008
