Hypocrisy

Let The Right One In: Or How A Director Can Film Children As If They Were Emo Gangsters And Hope To Be Called Sensitive.

In one of the first scenes, we see a man in long shot knock another man unconscious, then hang him upside down from a tree, then grab a knife to slit his victim's throat, at which point he steps in front of the camera to hide the act: the director is being "sensitive" about violence...
Except he cuts from that shot to a close-up of the blood trickling down into a bottle, with sound effects to boot. Giving cheap blood thrills while pretending to be discreet about it.

I saw the film just after having read an article by Daney in La Maison Cinema et Le Monde in which he explores how the dividing line between progressive (seen in his argument as proposing a positive proleterian class heroism) and immoral cinema runs through, and not between, "industry" and "art" cinema (films d'auteurs). It was not, therefore, too much of a surprise to find that the film this vampire blood-porn fest reminded me of the most was the other film to have made me so angry recently: Watchmen. Same hypocritical attitude to violence, same superficial disdain for human emotions passing off as depth, same sickly fascination for power, which here means the power to slaughter...