CAST: Kåre Hedebrant - Oskar
Lina Leandersson - Eli

PLOT: Oscar, an overlooked and bullied boy, finds love and revenge through Eli, a beautiful but peculiar girl who turns out to be a vampire.


In this much talked about Swedish film, we are presented with a relationship between two awkward youths. One, a young boy named Oskar, the film opens up with. Oskar is a troubled youth, he fantasizes about stabbing a particular bully at his school, doesn't seem to have friends, and enjoys reading about grisly murders in the paper. He is also a horrifically frail looking child.

The other youth is a young girl, Eli. The viewer can already tell that there is something different about her from the outset, the way she jumps down from the jungle gym in the playground when they meet. She is also awkward, insisting they can't be friends. We never see Eli outside of the jungle gym, or indeed, during the day. We find out shortly into the movie that she is a vampire.

As the movie continues, we see the relationship between them build, how she provides him with a similar isolated mind to dwell with when she's awake, (at night), and how she helps him overcome his fear of the bully at his school. Their relationship builds, but while that happens, Eli's insatiable appetite for blood causes her to hunt on local townspeople, who start to sniff her out ...

As I was watching this movie, I couldn't help feeling completely, emotionally detached from what was happening on screen. I think, partially, it was Oskar, who couldn't of been more of an emotionless husk. Now I realize that the lack of human feeling in Oskar was part of the point, how else would he start befriending a vampire who merely kills neighboring townsfolk and even drinks his blood at one point, but how am I supposed to connect with a pathologically antisocial pint squat.

There was a dichotomy in this movie. On one hand, you have a relationship that gets developed involving innocent 12 year olds, on the other, you have a serial killing vampire and a boy who shows no noticeable human emotion besides occasional happiness, and I'm including empathy in that list. I had a hard time being more than mildly interested in this movie.

On the plus, there were some horrific scenes of violence. The ending scene, involving a swimming pool, seems to have become quite famous. Was this meant to be a horror too? I don't feel it succeeded on that if it did.

6.5 of 10 - Mildly entertaining, I wouldn't call it anything more. Maybe I'll try to watch it again someday.