The original filmmakers — director Tomas Alfredson and writer John Ajvide Lindqvist (adapting his own novel) — made a classic the first time out, a vampire picture with all the hallmarks of recent-vintage northern European genre cinema: naturalistic-seeming performances, unfussy camerawork, a pervasive red/gold/brown color scheme suggesting that the whole movie was shot through a glass of rye whiskey. The differences between the films are legion, starting with the change of locale to 1980s Albuquerque and Reeves’ decision to make the young vampire more identifiably female (even though she tells the hero she’s without gender).

But what’s even more striking is Reeves’ forceful yet elegant visual style, which is so different from his work on the 2008 documentary-styled, shaky-cam monster epic “Cloverfield” that it takes a moment to register that the two movies were made by the same director. Every shot in “Let Me In” has a clearly defined narrative purpose and is gorgeous, too. Like Steven Spielberg and Brian DePalma in the 1970s and early ’80s — the last American masters of pre-digital blockbuster moviemaking, and clearly Reeves’ main visual inspirations — the director pushes right up to the edge of vainglorious cleverness, but never succumbs. When the movie abandons its go-to mode, muted efficiency, and becomes boldly emotional or visually arresting, it’s never superimposing spectacle on top of a story that doesn’t need it. Both the flourishes and fleeting grace notes amplify emotions that were present in the script.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the aborted kidnapping sequence highlighted here. Shot for shot, beat for beat, it’s the scene of the year, laying a foundation of succinct but meaningful shots and then building a madhouse on top of it. The pièce de résistance — you’ll know it when you see it — is one of the great recent examples of show-off filmmaking in service of story. The universe has been turned upside-down.

The scene we’ve highlighted here occurs about two-thirds of the way through the story. It’s the most surprising scene in the film, not because it gives anything away — it’s a dream sequence, with oblique imagery that invokes earlier events and foreshadows future ones — but because it’s stylistically different from the rest of “Winter’s Bone.” It’s almost a little abstract short film stuck in the middle of a visually conservative, Deep South spin on hard-boiled detective fiction. But it only feels random the first time you see it; by the time the final credits roll, every part of it — from the close-ups of panicked woodland creatures to the roar of chainsaws — makes perfect, beautiful sense.

This scene distills many of the film’s preoccupations into one hilarious, mortifying moment. As bits of half-assed “Flashdance” choreography find their way into the older sister’s performance, we get the sense that a sacred order is being disturbed. These “corrupt” influences didn’t come from the siblings or parents; they had to have come from the outside world that this family has spent its entire life trying to shut out. The young woman’s ludicrous channeling of Jennifer Beals starts out funny but soon becomes hauntingly desperate. When she moves toward the camera and begins furiously running in place — out of breath yet refusing to stop — her suppressed sexuality and thwarted desire to break free of her family spark some sort of emotional-chemical reaction. She looks as if she’s about to explode and take the whole family with her.

But it would be a mistake to say “The Social Network” merely transcribes Sorkin’s script to the big screen. Fincher’s direction is unassuming, save for a few cocky technical flourishes (such as hiring a single actor, Armie Hammer, to play Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s identical twin nemeses, the Winklevoss brothers). But that’s not the same thing as bloodless. As New Yorker film blogger Richard Brody pointed out:

Fincher uses his camera to go beyond the script to reach a high level of the art of portraiture — mainly done with fixed-frame shots that look long and hard and deep at the characters. In the October issue of American Cinematographer, Michael Goldman quotes the film’s director of photography, Jeff Cronenweth, on the way that he and Fincher, shooting with a digital camera, contrived to get very shallow depth-of-field … The effect is to keep characters in sharp focus and throw the background out of focus, in a classical visual trope of portraiture.

There’s one spectacular exception to Fincher’s otherwise modest approach: the rowing sequence. For about 90 seconds, the motor-mouthed script falls silent, and Fincher — a master of sumptuous imagery and geometrically exact cutting — takes over. The rowing scene works on its own as a short film about athleticism and entitlement — a portrait of rich young men who thought success was their birthright being crushed and humiliated. But there’s much more going on in this scene, and it comes from Sorkin’s theatrical flair and Fincher’s wicked playfulness as he interprets it. Between the retro-19th-century boater hats on the male spectators and Fincher’s use of special filters to make the whole thing look like a child’s play set, the sequence feels like a high-tech homage to one of Sorkin and Fincher’s inspirations, “Citizen Kane.” The contest might as well be taking place inside one of Charles Foster Kane’s snow globes. When that final buzzer sounds, the glass breaks, and Zuckerberg’s foes are washed away in the flood.

3. The movie’s laserlike focus is expressed in its shooting style. Director Pedro Costa (“In Vanda’s Room”) picks an angle and stays on it for minutes at a time. The entire film has perhaps three dozen shots. Most are impeccably composed and lit like something out of a film noir dream. The only exception is the film’s very last shot, which happens to be the one we’re watching here.