"You Ain't From Around Here"

"Let The Right One In" is almost certainly being remade and ruined in Hollywood as we speak. It's a brilliantly grey-white, muddied-snowfield of a film about the messy and contradictory and awkward and relentless business of being foreign and Other. The vampire element is wonderfully submerged within the alcoholism, teenaged fascination, petty small-town regrets, fears and revenges.

The snow is often slushy and dirty and scuffed and stained with mud or road grit or blood. A housing estate looks efficiently made, but essentially cheap, and probably poorly insulated. Sudden silences and empty schools after hours are cavernous, charged and active characters within the visual population of the film.

Plainly, there's an allegory for the disorientation and alienation of the immigrant, or stranger experience. It's never over-egged though, and the disappointed, pinched lives of the locals are well drawn in some lovely drinking scenes.

When the two children first meet, there's a beautifully awkward adult moment; only she knows why they can't be childhood friends, and they are both just ready to feel there is more than just being friends. She is hanging from a brutal metal climbing frame at her first appearance in the scene, and dismounts from it as she begins to speak. It's the only time we see her purely framed as a child in the film, and as soon as she speaks, the spell of her childhood is broken.