In “Let the Right One In”, Oskar is a lonely twelve year-old who spends most of his time narrowly escaping the torment of his fellow classmates. Come to his rescue is a twelve year old girl, the pale and quiet Eli. They both live next door to each other in a non-descript apartment complex in a suburb of Sweden. The year is sometime in the 80s, which we can deduce from the accurate costume choices and decor. When we realize Eli is a vampire who must kill and feed off humans in order to survive, not too much deters “Let the Right One In” from becoming a stock “human-vampire love film”. Both children are tied by a shared alienation which is never fully explored in a satisfactory manner. We are given shots of Oskar alone on the ice in a dark winterland contemplating revenge, or inside his room behind a windowpane, like a beautiful Christmas elf trapped inside an ice cube.

When Oskar asks Eli why she isn’t cold when she walks outside without a jacket, she responds, “I may have forgotten how.” Why? What is the larger sentiment being communicated in this film, if any? A scene like this is rife with possibilities and is one example of many missed opportunities. Oskar’s sexuality appears to be ambiguous. On more than one occasion, he states he does not care about Eli’s gender – he’d “like her anyway”. Could this be a possible clue as to the character’s alienation, perhaps? Yet none of these intriguing complexities are taken advantage of.

A truly genre-bending film, as many critics have hailed it, would play off the horror as well as the drama in equal measure. In her New York Times review, Manohla Dargis mentions an “elevated sense of beauty” in which the filmmaker takes the “morbid unhapiness of his characters seriously”. Yet nothing could be farther from the truth. Oskar and Eli are outcasts, yes, but we are not given a clear understanding as to why this might be. Children can be cruel to each other and lonely for many reaons, but never “just because”. This is the message “Let the Right One In” seems to offer, and it is entirely wrong-headed. We are left skating just above profundity on a thick layer of the usual shocks-of-the-trade, freezing, in search of something more.