If you are (as I am) a massive fan of the sublime 2008 Swedish horror film/dark fairy tale Let the Right One In, it’s nigh-impossible to approach The National Theatre of Scotland’s stage adaptation, now playing at the Moore Theatre, without trepidation.
Subtlety is the watchword for the original movie. It’s a quietly eerie meditation on the jarring, jerky pathway of adolescence, filtered elegantly through the prism of vampire mythology. Capturing its distinctive atmosphere on a theatrical stage seems a futile, maybe even blasphemous, enterprise. Happily, the live theater version of Let the Right One In works famously, retaining much of its source material’s appeal while still solidly forging its own path.
The film and play share the same basic setup. Oskar, a withdrawn and meek kid who endures incessant torment from local bullies, meets awkward/cute with his new neighbor, a young girl named Eli. She turns out to be a kindred spirit to the quiet boy, and Oskar finds happiness and solace in their friendship. But Eli’s enigmatic nature points to something much more terrifying than simple adolescent aloofness, and her connection to several brutal killings in their small town becomes creepily apparent.
The versions diverge considerably from there. The original film and novel spring from a distinctively glacial Nordic sensibility: Passion, emotion and horror are frequently implied but seldom spill to the surface. On a live stage, Christine Jones’s very effective main forest set does tap into the original’s melancholy beauty, and John Tiffany’s assured direction offers sufficient quiet breathing space for the atmosphere to sink in. But a scrappy, quintessentially Scottish sense of working-class bluntness grounds writer Jack Thorne’s adaptation and the characters populating it, without dampening the story’s sense of unearthly creepiness. That directness extends to the relationship between the two protagonists. Sexual attraction’s only hinted at between the film’s middle-school age kids, but the Oskar and Eli of the stage version are older, and adolescent sexual tension more fully informs their interactions.
The two leads provide a significant portion of the play’s effectiveness. The gentle spirit, clumsiness and expressiveness of Cristian Ortega’s Oskar pull effectively at the heartstrings. And Lucy Mangan’s body language, wild hair and wide eyes perfectly convey Eli’s combination of awkward charm, innocence and occasionally frightening otherworldliness.
Let the Right One In makes canny use of its nature as a live beast. The film conveyed characters’ emotional states through the quiet expansiveness of its cinematography. Steven Hoggett’s inspired live choreography telegraphs those emotions with several effective detours into dance-inspired movement. There’s a wonderful passage early in the play where a frustrated Oskar jabs a knife at a tree, while black-clad figures in the background gracefully mimic his motions—resonant visual semaphore for the emotionally-heightened state he’s enduring in the moment. The stage variant also does an effective job of combining Tiffany’s direction, Chahine Yavroyan’s atmospheric lighting, Gareth Fry’s immersive sound design, and Olafur Arnalds’ score to bring the chills. There’s at least one jump scare here that’ll rival anything you see on a movie screen or live stage all year.
Not every new wrinkle sits well in translation. A few of the minor characters feel a little too broadly-sketched, which likely explains why Jo Freer’s indisputably solid work as Oskar’s alcoholic, flawed mom didn’t quite connect emotionally for me. And the play’s attempt to replicate the film’s astonishing swimming pool sequence, imaginative as it is, can’t quite deliver the original’s impact.
But those minor gripes pale next to all of the things the National Theatre of Scotland’s adaptation does so very right. The play’s final moment—a train ride made wonderfully evocative by a single strip of flickering fluorescent lights, Ortega’s hunched figure in a chair, and a steamer trunk placed on the floor a few feet away from him—perfectly synthesizes this story’s dark fairy-tale roots, and it summarizes this theatrical version with immersive efficacy. Descents down rabbit holes don’t come more hauntingly resonant than this.
Let the Right One In runs at the Moore Theatre through Feb. 12.