The Swedish horror-drama about a love between a vampire and a bullied schoolboy is brought to life once more in this sensitive, ambiguous adaptation

Life is Grimm and it's getting grimmer for Oskar (Martin Quinn), a lonely pubescent boy living in a small community on the edge of a forest where even the living seem to be half-dead. In the opening scenes, the light makes the scurrying adults look like walking corpses.

John Tiffany's exquisitely beautiful and heartbreakingly sad staging of John Ajvide Lindqvist's cult Swedish vampire novel turned movie is set in a silver-birch world that is as much in an icy grip as Narnia. Christine Jones's eerie, atmospheric design even features a Narnia-esque lamp-post, one whose dim light illuminates something nasty: a body trussed upside down from a tree like a pig, so the crimson blood drains out.

There is a serial killer on the loose but the police are at a loss, quite possibly because they have no experience of investigating crimes of the heart. The crimes are many: the bullying of the awkward, physically inept Oskar by Jonny (Graeme Dalling), the neediness of Oskar's alcoholic single mother (Susan Vidler), the emotional distance of Oskar's father (Gary Mackay) and the lack of protection offered to the boy by the school gym teacher (Gavin Kean).

The distorted child-parent relationships and misplaced love manifest themselves further in the warped possessiveness of Hakan (Clive Mendus), who has just moved in next door with Eli (Rebecca Benson), a girl everyone assumes is his daughter. Oskar thinks Eli smells like "an infected bandage", but these outsiders gradually strike up a friendship – two people whose otherness brings them together and answers a mutual need. But at a price.

Tiffany and writer Jack Thorne swap the social commentary of the original Swedish film for something less tangible but every bit as unnerving, exposing a community caught in the wintery grip of its own ferocious hungers and confusion over what it means to be a man, or indeed a human. This is a kind of coming-of-age love story, but a desperate one. Eli (brilliantly played by Benson with savage fragility) is, of course, centuries old and eternally young; Oskar escapes with his life, but swaps one kind of winter for another.

The ambiguities of the story, its comic potential and lingering tragedies, are not shirked, and Tiffany's production – textured with Ólafur Arnalds' score and Steven Hoggett's movement – is so painfully tender that, as you watch the show, it feels as if layers of your skin are gradually being flayed from your body.

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