"Let The Right One In" (2008)

(A swedish film...)

A blackeyed blackhaired girl named Eli, more or less 12 years old, asks a pale blonde boy to imagine what it is like to be 100 years old. Or 500 years, or 1,000. She tells him: "Imagine what it feels like to be me." She stares into his eyes and around her stonewashed eyes wrinkles form and around the wrinkles, shadows. She is 12 years old.

The boy whose hair like hay stays crisp and gold on the snowwhite of his puckered face looks out at the reflection of his ghostly body as it shines back at him from the glass window of his heated room, on which he places his hand like a blessing, like a curse. He blesses the snow outside the glass window that shines back the whiteness of his body. He curses the hand with the coldness of the glass, the hand that blesses the apparition of the outside snow with its hidden rosy deathlike warmth.

When the boy goes outside to a playground swamped in snow he takes his pocket knife and calls a solitary tree a piggy and stabs it to death. He stabs it multiple times; he waits to see if blood pours from the wounded tree, but nothing globs down, only a glimmer of a shadow, a frozen teardrop. He imagines that the knife is his tongue and with words he strikes every living thing dead. In death he finds that every living thing continues to live and to die. He finds that Eli, the 12 year old girl who hungers for nothing less than life and life alone, is a dead girl who continues despite her death to live. He sees her mourning her youth when she looks into his eyes.

He first meets her when he turns around. "I live on the jungle gym." Like an iron feather she jumps down.

He sees that she chooses not to eat away at his youth. She must be let in, she must be invited. When she eats away at the life stored up in others, she finds death. So she must be invited. Life is a feast for her and she waits until she is invited.

The boy who has come to know himself in the glass reflection of his ghostly pale body invites her. He asks for blood, but he learns death; he knows now that death is but a beginning to life. She gives him blood and she receives life, her torn youth again.

When he looks into her eyes he sees a fire consuming the body; he sees her withered body like a crop of shadows gathered around a watchtower at midnight. Her eyes roar like a black ocean aching for blood. He is terminally in love.