She is human - well, she was, anyway - and needs to be loved, just like everybody else does.
A confession: an hour into Let The Right One In (Lat den ratte komme in), Swede director Tomas Alfredson's gorgeous, meticulously-crafted adaptation of John Ajvide Lindqvist's screenplay of his book about vampirism and disillusionment, I grew a little restless. And then a little bored.
This is not to say that Let The Right One In - the title's adapted from the Morrissey tune, "Let the Right One Slip In" - is a bad film. It's very good, in fact - I'd go so far as to say it's the most perfectly realized vampire flick I've seen since Kathryn Bigelow gathered up Aliens alumns Lance Henriksen, Bill Paxton, and Jenette Goldstein for 1987's Near Dark, and the cast - particularly Oscar (Kare Hedebrant), whose fumbling discovery of manhood the story orbits around, and the hypnotic Eli (Lia Leandersson), the girl who's "been twelve for a long time" - is simply wonderful. So, yes, good film, very good. But what had me shifting in my seat was the realization that this movie was not for me, or at least, someone in his early thirties.
Ten, fifteen years ago, I would've been mad for this flick (instead of merely entertained), though I'm sure I wouldn't have understood why: the underlying theme of LTROI is that love - in particular, the romance of love, falling in love - is, to coin a phrase, wasted on the old. While it's a bold point to make, it's also completely immature, and it left me feeling a little cold to the events and the characters on-screen - a bit like tweenies Oscar and Eli, the movie's rather closed off to the rest of us, somewhat self-absorbed, and dispassionate, which is weird considering it's a movie about a boy who falls in love for a little (little-ish) girl who sucks blood. The overall result is something just (only just) this side of a horror movie for people who don't generally like horror movies and otherwise, it's tailor-made for lovelorn nerds (like I was ten or fifteen years ago).
