A Frightening and Feral First Love
Ben BrantleyJanuary 25, 2015: Few bloodsuckers are as irresistible as Eli, the wan and abject heroine of Let the Right One In, which quietly shivered open on Sunday night to wring your heart while scaring the mortal stuffing out of you. True, Eli is nothing like the beautiful It vampires who slither across screens in movies like Only Lovers Left Alive and the Twilight series. As portrayed by the remarkable Rebecca Benson in this gut-clutching import from the National Theater of Scotland, now at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn through Feb. 15, Eli resembles some stunted woodland plant, long deprived of sun and nourishment. Her glamour quotient is nil, as are her social skills, and she is said to smell like a cross between pus and a wet dog. Yet she speaks to that little creature in all of us that will always feel rejected and alone in this big, brutal world. And she somehow confirms your darkest suspicions that the human race isn’t even worth belonging to. For a lad like Oskar (Cristian Ortega), a social pariah just entering puberty, she is oh so easy to love. Adapted by Jack Thorne from a novel and screenplay by the Swedish writer John Ajvide Lindqvist, and killingly staged by John Tiffany and Steven Hoggett, Let the Right One In is both the bleakest and most compassionate of vampire stories. It provides the surface frissons you expect from portraits of the undead, with graphic bloodletting and a couple of great “gotcha” (in the neck) moments. (There’s a reason the credits include a special effects designer, Jeremy Chernick.) But the play is scary in deeper ways. In presenting an eternal, innocently murderous child as the ideal playmate for a bullied boy from a broken home, Right One addresses our most primitive instincts for retribution, the same ones that animated our adolescent revenge fantasies against everyone who spurned or humiliated us.
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