BOY MEETS girl in the tender tale of first love at the emotional heart of Let the Right One In. So what else is new? Quite a lot, as it happens, beginning with the revelation that the girl is a vampire.

She is Eli (Lina Leandersson), who, in 1982, moves with her guardian to a snow-covered Stockholm suburb in the depths of winter.

Eli attracts the curiosity of a bright but friendless schoolboy, Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant) who lives next door with his divorced mother. To pass the time in this drab and dreary area, he engages in solitary amusements with his Rubik’s Cube and, ominously, a scrapbook of grisly murder reports.

Like Clint Eastwood's singing prospector in Paint Your Wagon, Oskar talks to the trees but goes further when he stabs the bark as a surrogate for the malevolent boys who sadistically bully him at school.

Oskar is 12 and pallid, as is Eli, although she admits she’s been 12 “for a long time”. To provide her with blood infusions, her guardian methodically stuns a young man, hangs him upside down and slits his throat so that the blood will pour into a container underneath. Eli, who can fly, goes straight for the jugular, preying on human kindness as she swoops on victims. She urges Oskar to hit back at the school bullies, and hit them harder. If he doesn’t, we suspect that they will get it in the neck from her.

John Ajvide Kindqvist’s wholly intriguing screenplay, based on his own novel, brings several fresh angles to the mass of vampire lore – that cats possess the instinct to recognise them as alien creatures, and cueing the title, that mortals, if they are to survive, must invite the vampires into their homes.

Director Tomas Alfredson makes sparing use of explicit gore and special effects – and dispenses with such familiar trappings as garlic and stakes through the heart – as he imaginatively roots the narrative in the realism of everyday life. The result is entrancing as he establishes a rich, haunting atmosphere and sustains it throughout his accomplished film, which succeeds in startling the viewer at times with the subtlest of touches.

The movie is formed in distinctively photographed compositions framed to make striking use of the widescreen format. The soundtrack adds significantly to the simultaneously fascinating and unsettling mood, in the highly effective sound design and in the lush orchestral score by Johan Soderqvist that counterpoints the unfolding drama. And Alfredson elicits beguiling performances from the two wonderfully expressive newcomers cast as the young social outcasts at its centre.

Directed by Tomas Alfredson. Starring Kåre Hedebrant, Lina Leandersson, Per Ragnar, Henrik Dahl, Karin Bergquist, Peter Carlberg. 16 cert, limited release,114 min★★★★