Yesterday's Movies

Before watching the movie:

I’m pretty sure I remember promotion for this movie, which is strange because foreign films hardly ever get significant US advertising campaigns. However, I have very clear memories of ads for the subsequent English-language remake with a slightly different title confusing me because wasn’t this the same story that came out a couple years ago?

I remember a lot of window knocking and vampires in the snow. I think it’s a coming of age movie, so it would center around children? The title sounds like there are good vampires and bad vampires and you have to know which one to invite inside (a vampire rule I think this movie introduced to me).

After watching the movie:

Oskar lives with his mother in a suburb of Stockholm, tormented by bullies but dreaming of violent revenge at home playing with a knife. Moving into the apartment next door arrive reclusives Hakan, a middle aged man, and Eli, who appears to be a pale-skinned, dark haired girl about Oskar’s age. Appearing to him when Oskar is playing alone in the courtyard, Eli matter of factly tells him they can’t be friends, but they do soon form their own bond. Meanwhile, Hakan takes the train into the next suburb and kills a young man in a park, intending to drain the blood to bring to Eli, but is interrupted by a dog and its people, forcing Eli to attack and feed on a man from the local community. As Oskar and Eli’s friendship grows, Eli tells Oskar he should fight back against his bullies, and asks him if the only reason he likes her is because she looks like a girl. She’s twelve, but she’s been twelve for a long time. Soon, after another failed attempt to harvest Blood for Eli, Hakan gets arrested, but not before painfully disfiguring himself to prevent identification and so keep Eli safe, and Eli gets interrupted feeding on neighborhood member Virginia, who starts to show her own vampiric symptoms. Oskar and Eli’s friendship turns romantic, and Eli reveals her secrets to him, but it becomes increasingly apparent they cannot keep living in this place with their natures the way they are.

I feel like my summary of the plot strips out a lot of the childhood innocence that gives this movie its charm, which contrasts the violence and supernatural horror. Every scene that Eli and Oskar are together is just cute, though sometimes it’s cute in a kids being kids way and sometimes in a kids trying to be adults way, and sometimes it’s cute despite the vampiric horror undercutting the scene.

I did have a lot of questions after the movie that I had to look up, but I didn’t miss them, they aren’t in the movie. However, many of my questions are answered in the book it’s based on, and some of them I was happier not knowing. It’s hard to tell what things aren’t spelled out because they were secondary to the core friendship and the filmmaker wasn’t interested and which were left out because they were distasteful, though I do know the flashback to Eli’s origins was cut because the director refused to film it as planned.

I have absolutely no actual learning of Swedish, butI knew sometimes it sounds like English with a Swedish accent, so I was expecting to have some moments of clarity where the dialogue sounds almost familiar. It’s close to Germanic, and English is close to Germanic too. What I didn’t expect was so many moments where it sounded like Spanish with a Swedish accent. Evidently there’s more Romance influence in Nordic languages than I thought.

For someone who’s not really a fan of gory horror movies, this is a bit much, but made up for with the central story. For someone who’s not really a fan of coming of age romance, it’s probably made up for by the gore and spooky effects. But much like the characters, this movie comes from two worlds that go unexpectedly well together.