Blood flows as freely as adolescent hormones in the National Theatre of Scotland’s stage adaptation of the 2008 Swedish film “Let the Right One In.” It is both a moving examination of teenage alienation and a chilling vampire story.
The ominous tone is immediately established by Christine Jones’ set design featuring bare birch trees in a wintry forest. These are woods you don’t want to go into, since they’re frequented by a serial killer who drains his victims’ blood into a plastic jug. At least he’s polite about it.
“Forgive me,” he mournfully mutters to a strung-up man as he slices his throat. The killer, Hakan (a very spooky Cliff Burnett), is the “father” of Eli (Rebecca Benson), a young girl who has just moved next door to the teenage Oskar (Cristian Ortega) and his single mom (Susan Vidler). The two young people soon meet in the woods, where she scampers over a jungle gym like a feral cat.
Lonely and socially awkward, Oskar’s immediately attracted to Eli, even though she smells, as he puts it, like an “infected bandage.”
There’s a good reason for that, since she eventually reveals that she lives on blood, but she doesn’t label herself with the “V” word.
“I’m not that. I choose not to be that. So I’m not . . . that,” she explains.
Things come to a head when Oskar is attacked by bullies at school, and Eli comes to his rescue in a horrific scene of bloody carnage that leads to an unlikely but tender happy ending.
Director John Tiffany and “associate director/movement” Steven Hoggett continue their successful collaboration (“Once,” “The Glass Menagerie”) with this gorgeously stylized production scripted by Jack Thorne. Although some of the choreographed interludes are a bit much, they generally add to the haunting atmosphere, as does Ólafur Arnalds’ cello-laden musical score and Gareth Fry’s sound design.
The two young leads are both terrific, with Ortega the personification of teen gawkiness and Benson simultaneously creepy and touching as the lonely young girl who’s “lived for a long time.”
A coming-of-age tale for the ages, “Let the Right One In” will haunt you long after you’ve left the theater.