Let the right one in

I hate scary films - hate blood and gore and everything that's jumpy and i'm afraid of the dark. I have such a vivid imagination I can never sleep or stop dreaming/imagining things afterwards ever since I was little, so I generally avoid anything like this on screen. I'm not at all squeamish in real life but for some reason I can't stand it on screen.

Tucked in jumpers, Fake snow and blood aside however... this was a great film and I actually quite enjoyed it. I have come to expect a high standard of films on Kino4 night now so this was no surprise.

It was about half way through when I started to wonder if the girl was real or not. I think I kind of concluded in my mind that she wasn't - that it was the boy doing all those things and she was in his imagination to help him to get through the bullying. There was a few points through the film that made me think that - the conversation about her killing because she has to and him killing because he wanted to. Then at the end when she rescued him from the pool, the closing scene when he was on the train doing Morse code to her - that was strange?

I don't know if i'm right or not... There were obviously lots of things that suggested the girl was real - the guys in the cafe said the man who moved in had a child, and the woman who was bitten... I don't know... but in my mind that's what I was imagining. This film reminded me quite a lot of Pan's labyrinth.

It was a great film though, a good one for halloween. Quite a touching love story really! I think the bleak Swedish council estate was the perfect backdrop to the film. The children were so pale, like they were as pure as the snow. One thing I couldn't get over was how good the children were at acting. The story centralised around them and they're acting was flawless, so emotional and just so far beyond what most established adults could do. The intertwining story lines addressed - Oscars father and mother, the bullies and Eli's 'carer' made this a much more complex film, raising so many questions and emotions.