Louis Vuitton Hawaii International FIlm Festival 2008

Against the dreary landscapes of a wintery Sweden that evoke a great feeling of loneliness, LET THE RIGHT ONE IN locates a sense of belonging not within traditional relationships by summoning vampirically queer sexualities. Oskar, an androgynous boy emasculated by schoolyard bullies, lives under the broken marriage of his parents. Eli, the new "girl" next door, lives with an elderly man initially presumed to be her father through our expectations about kinship but later revealed to be her lover. Though one could assume that Oskar and Eli become friends contrary to Eli's warning in In their first meeting, perhaps the two share something other than friendship. "Love" also certainly fails as an appropriate descriptive for a deviant relationship that is sexualized without sex, revealed in the film's transformation of the gender dynamics and removal of overtones concerning sexual propriety of "letting the right one in." It is Oskar who lets in Eli, a non-penetrative penetration that locates affective attachments not merely within each other but also through a variety of external mediating agents like a victim's blood shared in their only kiss. It is not a "love" that knows no boundaries; rather, it is precisely because of those boundaries that intimacy between Oskar and Eli grows. Age, gender, and species differentials negotiate themselves through eroticized violence and gentleness as the obscene third parties bringing Oskar and Eli together. By removing heteronormativity as the privileged access point to romance to invite multiple parties and pleasures that pervert the meaning of romance itself, LET THE RIGHT ONE IN simultaneously fills us with queasiness and warmth to redistribute the intimate sensible in a forced recognition of queer affects.