Well, I finally saw this film (I know, as a Swede I should be severely punished for not having seen it yet) and I need somewhere to put my thoughts about it, so you guys will have to deal with my rambling.
Here goes:
I agree with most of the things people on this board have said, even though I don't really think the relationship between Eli and Oskar is the most interesting, or the most important, thing. What really made me touched by the film was how it dealt with the whole "vampire-issue". I absolutely loved how the writer basically has taken one of the oldest and most mysterious myths, completely unmystefied it, put in a Stockholm suburb and added a completely different plot to it. I mean, I find the main plot in this film to be about Oskar, and how he tries to deal with his loneliness and the bullies. You never really find out a lot about Eli - how did she become a vampire, when, where? It's almost like her life is some sort of subplot, and less relevant to the story.
For some reason, I see many similarities between this film and FÅ, if you look at their differences from Hollywood films. Whereas teenage films in the US tend to be about happy, good-looking, polished kids with exciting lives, Fucking Åmål is the Swedish version - unhappy, normal-looking kids with dead boring lives and and who are looking for a way out of that. Basically the way most teenagers in real life are. Now if you take the case of Vampire films, it's actually pretty much the same - Twilight is mysterious and sexy and vampirehood is romanticized, something to almost look up to. Then look at Let the right one in - here you have the dull, everyday life of a completely normal kid, and the vampires in the film are not mystified or romanticized at all. It deals with something as fantastic as what the everyday life of a vampire really
would look like. The everyday life where you have do go into the forest cold winter nights to hide the ones you have had to kill. The difficultness of actually killing - the man Eli lives with failes to get the blood both times, and doesnt seem to enjoy it at all. And the whole film is set in a stone-cold Swedish suburb, with grey surroundings and people. Not very mysterious at all. But still in some way they are able to keep it interesting, and that is definately impressive. Or maybe that is exactly the interesting thing about the film - take the mysteriousness and sexyness of hollywood vampires, and lose it. This is the real deal. Vampire-flicks goes Bergman-style, gotta love it!
Thanks for reading, and whatcha think?