This tender, creepy, claustro­phobic horror, based on a bestselling Swedish novel, is as unsettling for its real elements as for its supernatural ones. It’s February 1982, on an estate in Sweden. It’s a dark, cold, desolate environment, and the individuals who live there, cloaked in loneliness and alcohol, are already on the edge of madness. Oskar is 12 and bullied; he is obsessed by fantasies of violent, bloody revenge. He falls in love with a mysterious girl who moves in next door; later, he realises she’s a vampire, responsible for some horrible local murders.

The conjunction of realism and vampirism jars at first, but makes the piece all the more disconcerting. The camera films up close, making everyday objects intense and surreal, as seen through the eyes of a child. The vampire is not the sanitised, eroticised creature of recent culture, but rather resembles those in early folkloric tales – she smells and is more animal than ethereal. The two young actors are powerfully strange, with a tangible connection; particularly striking is a scene where Oskar refuses to invite the vampire into his flat but she enters anyway and starts bleeding out of her eyes; he then lets her in, literally and metaphor­ically. A film about alienation and power and escape, Let The Right One In deftly mixes dark and light and ends in a cathartic bloodbath.