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I'm not the target audience for Twilight, and I know it. If I didn't, I would have been quickly clued in by the fact that, as I watched the film, I was mostly surrounded by adolescent girls. Young girls generally have different aesthetic standards than 40-year-old arts critics, and tend to feel strongly about the things they like (as evidenced by a YouTube video currently making the rounds showing a throng of young ladies thrown into vocal fits of agony upon seeing their favorite American Idol lose the popular vote.) It is, for the most part, these girls that have made the Twilight series of books by Stephenie Meyer into bestsellers, and it is to these girls that the film adaptation addresses itself.

Twilight hasn't been getting great reviews, mostly from critics who, presumably, are also not adolescent girls, but there are a few things the film does well, and it deserves credit for these things. I have not read the books, but reviews I have read suggest that the protagonist, a 17-year-old loner named Bella Swan, isn't an especially well-developed character. The film version smartly cast a young actress named Kristen Stewart in the role, and she limns the character with a sort of glowering, tough cookie quality. She's a bit of a klutz, which the film underplays nicely. She has a tendency to trip when walking any real distance, and things fall over when she's around, but this isn't played for cheap slapstick, which films often do as a sort of dodge when they must make an unfunny actress funny. Instead, Stewart barely acknowledges her little mishaps, pausing only long enough to scowl angrily, and then shrug it off. She plays it so naturally that there are moments when it doesn't seem like this klutziness is written into the character, but instead that the actress actually is a little maladroit and director Catherine Hardwicke just let the cameras roll anyway.

This film also gives a generous amount of time to Bella's strained relationship with her father, a chief of police in a small town in the Pacific Northwest. At the start of the film, Bella has been living with her mother in Phoenix, and when she moves in with her father, the two spend a lot of time not knowing how to behave around each other. The father is played by Billy Burke in a James Brolin mustache, and he nicely captures a sense of awkward paternalism. He makes a lot of sweet little gestures for his daughter, such as getting her new tires for her truck when the weather turns bad, but he has a hard time talking with her, and can be a little standoffish as a result. He is also polite enough to pretend not to notice when his daughter knocks things over.

But this relationship, which is unforced and lovely, is not the subject of Twilight. No, the subject is vampires, and here, unfortunately, the film tends toward the ridiculous. Bella's crush in her new school is a young man named Edward Cullen, played by Robert Pattison. Cullen is very pale, has jet black eyes, and can do unexpected things like stop a speeding truck with his fist. Cullen is part of a clan of vampires, and they all tend toward a dreamy, romantically cinematic idea of vampirism that has come into vogue lately. They all wear a lot of hair gel and some sort of cream base that makes their skin preposterously pale. They dress in black hoodies and brood a lot -- a few of the vampires, especially Edward, constantly look like they might burst into tears. They have a keen sense of irony and enjoy the sort of middlebrow art that passes for highbrow in films, such as listening to Debussy. And there isn't much more to them, as they aren't characters so much as a stockpile of cinematic vampire cliches. At least Pattison seems to have a sense of humor about his role, as he delivers much of his dialogue with an embarrassed shrug, and, to be fair, he is sometimes given some genuinely funny lines. In one scene, he explains to Bella that he can read minds, and demonstrates by telling her what everyone in a coffee shop is thinking. "Sex. Money. Sex. Sex. Money. Sex," he says, deadpanning. Then he comes across one especially happy looking middle aged man. "Cat," he says.

Coincidentally, there is another teen vampire movie in town, or, more properly, pre-teen. It's called Låt den rätte komma in in its native Swedish, or Let the Right One In in English, and there are some surprising similarities. Both involve a social outcast befriending a vampire; In this case it's a sweetly oddball 12-year-old named Oskar, who has a blond pageboy haircut and a perpetually runny nose, who meets a weird girl named Eli one night while both are malingering around the tiny metal structure that passes for a playground outside their nondescript apartment building. In both films, the vampire warns the human that they should not consider being friends, and there is an almost identical line of dialogue: Both say their age, (17 in Twilight, 12 in Let the Right One In), but then go on to say that they have been that age for a very long time.

But these similarities are superficial. Let the Right One In is a much tougher, and darker, film than Twilight. While both Oskar and Bella are misfits, Bella quickly makes friends, while Oskar is relentlessly bullied at school. And Twilight is a relatively bloodless film -- vampiric murders tend to happen offscreen. In Let the Right One In, death is handled with a sort of graphic nonchalance, as though it is so common to see a man hung upside down from a tree and butchered that there is no need to film it in anything but the middle distance. In fact, director Tomas Alfredson is extremely careful about what he shows and how he shows it. The film makes extensive use of very close shots and shifting focuses for many of the scenes, which denies audiences the opportunity to really figure out what is going on until Alfredson decides to show us. For instance, we see a pockmarked old man packing a variety of strange implements into a case, including a knife and a mask, but we don't know who or where this man is. There is quite a bit of this in the film -- scenes are shot as unfolding mysteries. This makes it even more potent when Alfredson shows sequences of great violence as a static medium shot, which is usually a shot used to establish a scene before the camera gets in really close to explore the gory details. But Alfredson holds these shots for a long time, and, as a result of their lack of the artifice that comes with editing, they start to take on the queasy quality of a documentary.

Eli, the vampire in this film, is quite different from the moussed runway models of Twilight. She's not quite the rodentlike undead of Nosferatu, but she lives in squalor and dresses in rags held together with string. She often looks filthy, and, when Oskar first meets her, he complains that she smells bad. We frequently see her with her face and mouth smeared with gore, which she never bothers to clean, letting it just turn brown and flake off. There is nothing appealing about this vision of vampirism except that, when she isn't leaping down at people and burying her face in their necks, Eli seems like a rather sweet girl. She and Oskar develop an odd but unexpectedly touching friendship; the usually retiring Oskar demonstrates an unexpected pushiness around her, at points seeming to dare her to hurt him, and making demands on her out of an entirely believable curiosity about her experience as a monster. Their friendship, and Alfredson's care in only showing audiences what he wants to, culminates in a bravura climactic confrontation between Oskar and his bullies, shot entirely underwater, that ranks as one of the most visually inventive scenes of horror I have ever seen.

The film hints at a few elements from the book that inspired it (by author John Ajvide Lindqvist), including a history of sexual violence in Eli's past. But, as is consistent with Alfredson's directoral stinginess, this information is doled out in tiny amounts, and otherwise kept hidden. And that's for the best. As it is, Let the Right One In has an overwhelming atmosphere of melancholy. It's the sort of film that the emo vampires of Twilight might watch and then cry about for hours and hours and hours.