Film Analysis on Let The Right One In

pick one of 2 prompts below

1) Let the Right One In offers a somewhat prolific feature of contemporary cinema: the critique, from the perspective of innocent, prepubescent children, of the cruel realities, norms, and regulations of the adult world. Indeed, Oskar’s relief at finding an ideal playmate and partner in Eli compensates for his broken home (divorced parents) and threatened existence at school (which is all but invisible to all adults in the film). Eli, for their part, is able to find nourishment (literal and perhaps metaphorical) outside the boundaries of human morality, requiring as they do the death of others in order to survive. Furthermore, we might say that the kinship struck between Oskar and Eli is, essentially, queer, for in several ways it operates outside of heteronormative relationships that dominate and characterize Swedish society as portrayed in the film. Write an essay that explores the film as a critique of adults and adult society from the perspective of children as queer subjects—queer not only because of Eli’s mysterious gender identity, but also because of the generally androgynous status of prepubescent children before they enter the gender regimes and social norms of the adult world.
2) Horizontal and vertical lines dominate the composition of Let the Right One In. Morse code, scars of possible castration, lanes in the school swimming pool, the brutalist architecture of 1980s Sweden, and the thin trees of Swedish forests are clearly interconnected and prolific. In class, we mentioned a couple of frameworks for how to understand this clearly intentional form of composition. Are these hard lines a critique of the standardizing impulses of European democratic socialism, something perhaps most obviously represented in the government housing where Oskar and Eli live? Or are they representative of the stifling norms—sexual and otherwise—that constrict the existence of Oskar and Eli? Write an essay that explores the prevalence of horizontal and vertical lines in the film—you may use the frameworks described here or use your own.

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