Let the Right One In

Oskar is twelve and alone in a way he has learned to live with, growing up in a Stockholm suburb in 1981 with a mother who is kind but absent and bullies at school who have made his daily existence a managed humiliation. He collects newspaper clippings about murders and practices what he would like to say to the boys who hurt him, alone in the courtyard outside his building after dark. Eli arrives with her companion Håkan and moves into the next apartment.

Eli comes out only at night. She solves puzzles. She tells Oskar she cannot be his friend. She tells him this more than once. They become friends anyway — a friendship conducted in cold courtyards and through a shared wall, Oskar telling Eli about his life, Eli telling Oskar almost nothing about hers. Håkan goes out in the night to kill people for Eli, collecting blood in plastic jugs, botching jobs with an increasing desperation. He is caught, pours acid over his own face, and is taken to hospital. Eli visits him in the night and drinks from the wound at his neck.

A woman killed by Eli in the woods is half-turned and eventually destroyed. Oskar understands what Eli is and does not stop the friendship. His bullies escalate: the older brother holds Oskar's face underwater in the school pool, telling him he has three minutes or he will lose an eye. Oskar counts. He reaches two minutes. Something happens above the surface. The water goes red.

Eli has killed them. Oskar finds the pool empty and calm. He goes back to the apartment building and finds Eli preparing to leave — a large box, a train to somewhere else. He gets in the box with her. They travel south. He taps on the wood in Morse code. She taps back.