I’d read about it for years, so when it showed up on cable, on the Independent Film Channel, my wife and I watched — not from the beginning — for 20 minutes before bedtime, just to see if it was as interesting as other Scandinavian productions we’d enjoyed. But we’d been spoiled. The English dubbing was as ham-handed as old Japanese Godzilla movies, too loud, oddly Ohio, and offputting.

But we were intrigued enough to find the Swedish original on Netflix. Which pointed up the problem IMDB reviewers had had. Multiple reviews of the IFC version got sidetracked in the same way this one did:

Oskar is lonely. His parents have separated, neither one wants him, he is alone a lot. He hangs around outside in the snowy Swedish night. One night, he meets a kid named Eli (Lina Leandersson) who is about his age. Eli is lonely, too, and they become friends. Oskar is at that age when he accepts astonishing facts calmly, because life has given up trying to surprise him. Eli walks through the snow without shoes… They decide to have a sleepover in his bed. Sex is not yet constantly on Oskar’s mind, but he asks, “Will you be my girlfriend?” She touches him lightly. “Oskar, I’m not a girl.” Oh.

Oh. Some of the reviewers concluded that girl vampire either/or boy vampire was, attractively, somehow the point. Cultural melding metaphor. Except it’s a dead wrong perspective. “I’m not a girl” means “I’m not a girl but a vampire.” The original Swedish version makes this unmistakeably clear. Footage was amputated from the dubbed IFC version no doubt because it would upset the new politically correct Hays Office. It’s a criminal offense to see (for a micro-second) the privates of a thousand year old vampire who is stuck at twelve.

Not highlighting this for any point other than that the theme of the movie is actually a positive view of humankind. The climax is driven by the vampire’s insistence that her human friend share, however briefly, the difference between the human desire to kill and the natural predator’s absolute need to kill in order to survive. They lean into one another out of opposite desires.

The love affair is real. The point of convergence is the urge to kill. The boy, ceaselessly bullied, wants to kill his persecutors. The vampire, ceaselessly pursued, wants to be more than a cold predator in mindless pursuit of prey.

It’s not a slasher film. The violence is sparse but intense and in the end dramatically just. (Also cinematically kick-ass.) The finale is philosophically thought provoking. And the girl Eli is, ultimately, more terrifying than Count Dracula.

I’m still thinking about it two days later. Never gave a moment’s thought to any other vampire movie after the credits rolled.

See for yourself.