Bullied kid befriends a vampire and becomes a sucker for the strange

In Swedish thriller Let the Right One In, a bullied kid befriends a vampire and his life gets both stranger and better.

Kare Hedebrant (centre) as Oskar in the Swedish film Let the Right One In, Wednesday, 8.30pm, World Movies (430).

With their burnished gloss and fluid editing, nothing else looks or feels quite like the films of immensely talented director Steven Soderbergh. Such is the case with his cautionary 2011 biohazard thriller Contagion (Sunday, 6.40pm, Thriller). Matt Damon stars as a bewildered
mid-western businessman who discovers his wife (Gwyneth Paltrow) is the first host and victim of a deadly superflu. Jude Law is memorable as an over-caffeinated blogger trying to undermine the pharmaceutical industry, and virus researcher Elliott Gould has the film’s best line, describing blogging as “graffiti with punctuation”.

Far better than it has any right to be, the 1993 Sylvester Stallone mountaineering action-adventure Cliffhanger (Monday, 12.55am, Action) benefits enormously from John Lithgow’s flamboyant villain and the percussive direction of Finnish-born Renny Harlin, who did the first Die Hard sequel.

It was inevitable that some enterprising Australian filmmaker would hop on to the zombie bandwagon, and that happened last year in spectacular fashion with the high-octane, low-budget horror comedy Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead (Friday, 8.30pm, Premiere). Kind of a cross between George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead and Mad Max, the film follows a handful of protagonists as they fight off the mutants, the military and a mad scientist during a cross-country dash. Young brothers Kiah (director) and Tristan (producer) Roache-Turner instinctively get the genre, and cult status beckons for this genre surprise.

Among the most profoundly chilling films of recent vintage is Swedish director Tomas Alfredson’s surprisingly tender 2008 thriller Let the Right One In (Wednesday, 8.30pm, World Movies). When a bullied 12-year-old from a Stockholm suburb befriends a mysterious new girl who just happens to be a vampire, his life begins to get stranger — but better, as well. (In a welcome twist on the dreaded American remake syndrome, director Matt Reeves’s English-language take on the material, Let Me In, is a standalone success itself — albeit in a necessarily altered but still faithful way.)

True Detective fans will be interested in Danish director Mikkel Norgaard’s nailbiting adaptation of the best-selling novel The Keeper of Lost Causes (Saturday, 12.45am, World Movies). When moody, hot-headed homicide detective Carl Morck (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) is transferred to the newly formed Dept Q and tasked with solving cold cases alongside similarly disciplined Assad (Fares Fares), things look bleak. But the mysterious suicide of rising politician Merete Lynggaard (Sonja Richter) draws them both into a hellish predicament. Screenwriter Nikolaj Arcel and cinematographer Eric Kress both worked on Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

The Keeper of Lost Causes (MA15+) 3.5 stars

Saturday, 12.45am, World Movies (430)

Let the Right One In (MA15+) 4 stars

Wednesday, 8.30pm, World Movies (430)

Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead (MA15+) 3.5 stars

Friday, 8.30pm, Premiere (401)