I think Elle's Karen Durbin put in best in 2008 when she wrote: "[Lina Leandersson's debut] evokes Eli's radical apartness with an air of watchful caution and a contained stillness of body that not only belies her childish appearance in a performance devoid of sentimentality [but also] perfectly captures the awful solitude of a creature who exists outside time."
Wow. "...the awful solitude of a creature who exists outside time." That is an INCREDIBLE line that throws me immediately into some sense of disembodied placelessness. Man, I wish I'd written that. It's beautiful, absolutely beautiful.
And the film at large is more poetic than anything horror-related. I'd call it a haunting elegy, really. A lamentation of disconnectedness.
I did try to find Lina Leandersson in some other roles, but she's only been in two more films since 2008's Let the Right One In, with her trail going cold altogether by 2013. She's even a ghost on social media.
On the one hand, that makes me sad for her, but on the other hand—good for her! Acting's a tough profession and an even nastier business, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with existing outside time. I do it all the...time!
I wish her all the best in her present and future endeavors, whatever they may be.
Oh, and for whatever it's worth, yes, Chloë Grace Moretz, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Richard Jenkins, and Elias Koteas starred in an American remake two years later, but as is often the case, we Michael Bay'd it with unnecessary special effects, obnoxious noisiness, and the outright elimination of deftness, stillness, and silence (which, as I've said, is what gave the original such soulfulness and beauty). Said another way, we ham-handed it all the way home.
Fortunately, director Matt Reeves then helmed a couple Planet of the Apes pictures followed by 2022's The Batman, each of which refined his touch and, for my money, proved he's a helmsman worth following into the abyss of isolation, a real modern-day ferryman guiding souls across the river Styx.
