Pun Salad

An arty Swedish horror movie; it is currently #188 on the IMDB's Top 250 movies of all time. I doubt that, but it's still pretty good.

Twelve-year-old Oskar is a skinny and awkward outcast at school, the preferred target of a bunch of bullies. He also, probably not coincidentally, has developed some pretty serious psychological problems, evidenced by his de-Niro-in-Taxi-Driver-style monologues while waving a knife.

But things change when Eli, a twelve-year-old girl—that's what she looks like, anyway—moves into the apartment next to his. She's reclusive, only coming out at night, and seems a tad mature for her age. And, oh yeah, people start getting murdered in grisly fashion for some reason.

The movie's set in 1982 Sweden; in one of the DVD extra features, the director speaks of Sweden being "halfway behind the Iron Curtain" at that time, with the clear implication that it was a drab and dispiriting place to live. Funny: back in 1982, it was only conservatives who said things like that. Nowadays, it's conventional wisdom.

The "bullies pick on unusual kid" theme appears in a lot of movies. American ones, of course, but over the past few years I've seen it in movies set in Britain, Afghanistan, Japan, and now Sweden. Sadly, it seems to be a cross-cultural human universal.