Matt (@Cleric20) Adcock
Let The Right One In captured my heart the second I saw the 2008 film (read my review).
I immediately sought out John Ajvide Lindqvist’s novel which didn’t just reinvent vampire lore, but reframed it as something painfully human: loneliness, bullying, longing, and the dangerous, intoxicating pull of being truly seen. Even the title itself feels like a whispered warning — lifted from a Let the Right One Slip In lyric — a plea for connection that carries the faintest suggestion you might be inviting in the wrong thing entirely.
So yes, walking into the National Youth Theatre’s take on it at the cool Underbelly Boulevard Soho, there was a flicker of dread. This is sacred ground. Get it wrong and you don’t just miss, you diminish something profound and iconic.
They don’t get it wrong.
This is the right one, a five-star, blood-pumping triumph.
Jack ‘Adolescence’ Thorne’s adaptation, under the direction of James Dacre, wisely avoids trying to recreate the film’s still, snowbound realism. Instead, it leans into something more theatrical, more unstable… A kind of waking nightmare built from movement, shadow, sound and sudden ruptures of violence. It feels less like a retelling and more like being dropped inside Oskar’s anxious inner world.
Which is exactly where this story belongs.
At the centre, Nicky Dune’s Oskar is superb. Bringing brittle awkwardness and suppressed fury. He isn’t just a victim. There’s something simmering underneath, something that makes you understand why Eli doesn’t just find him… she recognises him.
And Rachael Dowsett’s Eli is the real dark miracle here. She avoids every obvious trap, no gothic cliché, no quirky vampire affectations, instead giving us something unsettlingly other. Childlike, yes. Fragile, maybe. But also ancient, watchful, and quietly predatory. Her stillness is as powerful as her movement; when she does move, it’s with intent.
Together, they create that strange, queasy alchemy at the heart of the story. It’s a relationship that feels like salvation and damnation intertwined. A love story, if you like… provided you’re comfortable with the occasional arterial spray.
The ensemble work is sharp too. The NYT company move like a collective consciousness, bullying, circling, closing in. Scenes bleed into one another with dream-logic fluidity. Underbelly’s space becomes a kind of concrete purgatory: dim light, hard edges, nowhere to hide.
And when the violence lands, it lands hard.
There’s excellent support too. Michelle Asante brings a grounded warmth to Oskar’s mum who channels a fragile normality in a story rapidly losing its grip on the everyday. Meanwhile Colin Tierney’s Hakan is deeply unsettling, not monstrous in the obvious sense, but tragic, obsessive, and quietly decaying from the inside out.
What this production really understands, that the TV series version missed, is that Let The Right One In is fundamentally about sadness. Not misery for its own sake or even horror for the sake of it, but the deep, hollow ache of being unseen. The horror works because the emotional truth is so sharp.
There’s a moment towards the end when I witnessed the audience falling into a kind of collective silence — not fear exactly, but recognition. The sense that what’s unfolding isn’t just genre storytelling, but something uncomfortably close to real emotional need.
That’s rare but it’s earned.
The shadow of the original film still looms large, those performances, that tone, but this production doesn’t try to imitate it. It finds its own pulse. Something rawer. More immediate. More theatrical in the best sense.
Out of a potential 5, you have to go with a Darkmatters:
(5 - A bloody valentine to outsiders. Let this one in.)
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