Let Me In (2010) – Review

Standard remakes – you know, modern takes on older, classic films – are tricky enough to get right as it is without accidently making sure that a modern shift isn’t the exact thing that nullifies what made the original film so good in the first place; but matters get subtly tougher when we move onto the matter of Americanised remakes, i.e. foreign movies remade into English language versions. If crossing a time divide while keeping that special idea was tough, try crossing the cultural barrier, where some of the main reasons that an orginal film is so unique and engrossing is precisely because it comes from another country.
It can be done well, of course. Martin Scorsese managed it when he spun Infernal Affairs into The Departed and Gore Verbinski did admirably well when he remade The Ring, but surely the fangs were out for Matt Reeves when he attempted to Americanise Tomas Alfredson’s superlative Swedish vampire fable, Let The Right One In. Well guess what, not only did he not balls it up – but he made it pretty damn good, too.

Meet Owen, a profoundly lonely 12 year-old who is desperately trying to keep his head down as he traverses the snowy landscape of 1980s Los Alamos, New Mexico. Alienated by his introverted nature and targeted by merciless bullies, Owen is also emotionally wounded by the fact that his parents are separated and takes out his frustrations and powerlessness by role playing in secret as a masked killer from a cheesy movie.
One day, while he mopes on the monkey bars outside his mother’s apartment complex, he meets a young girl named Abby who apparently has just moved in with Thomas, her father, and seems to not have an issue causally hanging out in the snow in bare feet. At first, their relationship seems prickly, with the girl declaring right from the off that that can’t be friends, but as time goes on, the two start to bond in attempt to stave off the gnawing loneliness they both feel; but things – obviously – are not what they seem.
You see Abby may be twelve, but by her own admission, she’s been twelve for a very long time and Thomas isn’t her father at all, but instead is her aged companion who goes out at night and murders young men in order to provide the girl with the blood and anonymity she requires. That’s right, Abby is a vampire.
However, while she may prowl the night and rip the throats out of her prey with the flick of her teeth, Abby isn’t some wizened, ancient soul stuck in the body of a child – in many ways, she still very much a twelve year old who wants to do all the things a lonely girl her age wants to do. The problem is that Thomas’ advanced years mean he’s making mistakes and forcing a starving Abby to break cover and risk discovery and when a local detective starts looking into the string of bodies left in their wake, Owen has to choose what it is he really wants – an empty life full of fear, or a life with Abby.

While Matt Reeves’ Let Me In can never quite match the beguiling heights of Alfredson’s original movie (released only two years earlier), the man who gave us the 9/11 Kaiju allegory, Cloverfield, and went on to make biblical level monkey stuff while taking up the reigns of the Planet Of The Apes trilogy and delivering us an even darker Batman navigates the pitfall of the American remake remarkably well. While he admittedly, but understandably, sands down the more creepier aspects of Owen and Abby’s love story and the relationship she has with the older Thomas, he still manages to keep the beating heart of the original alive thanks to his dedication to keeping its mournful, thoughtful tone very much alive. It isn’t going to be accused of breaking new ground, however, and if Let Me In has any find of noticable flaw, it’s that the movie sticks too close to the original story and doesn’t really have than much new to add if you’ve already seen Let The Right One In.
But that’s always been the catch for remaking a foreign film purely for the entertainment of people who wont read subtitles, and if this is your first exposure to the world first described in John Ajvide Lindqvist’s source novel, Reeves’ version proves to be a worthy, streamlined account of this alternative take on the relationship between vampires and their human familiars. In this respect, we find that the burgeoning relationship between Kodi Smit-McPhee and Cholë Grace Moretz’s Owen and Abby is as tragic as it is heartwarming. Yes, the painfully awkward boy finally finds a kindred spirit to cling to in the icy hell that his life (notice we rarely get a clear shot of his mother in order to heighten his increasing alienation), but a very real indication of his eventual fate in the form of Richard Jenkins’ emotionally depleted Thomas, whom we find out also first met Abby at a very young age. To see what Owen’s life will become as he ages and his beloved companion does not, we just need to watch Jenkins in action – a man who is willing to murder people and drain them like pigs for love, but who knows that the day he will eventually be discarded for someone else is fast approaching.

It’s this level of empathy that makes Let Me In such a satisfying remake, both Abby and Thomas have both committed gruesome atrocities, but they are both just as much victims as the poor bastards they bleed dry with the former utterly unable to control her hunger and the latter hopelessly smitten in a way that make Dracula’s Renfield seem fiercely independent in comparison.
The performances are excellent and Reeves knows not to fuck with a good thing when it comes to lifting some of the more memorable, horror set pieces over into the ’10 do-over. Yes, the admittedly awkward cat sequence has been exorcised and there’s some noticable CGI around some of the attacks, but the extraordinarily memorable swimming pool moment is still intact, as is Thomas’ desperate attempt to mask his identity when his luck finally runs out.
However, probably the best aspect of the film is that it doesn’t try a put a Spielbergian filter on what’s going on – this isn’t E.T. with fangs. While some of the characters do more obviously horrific things, Owen is also not seen through rose tinted (or blood stained) glasses as his more uncomfortable fantasies, such as pretending to be a ruthless killer on the privacy of his own bedroom isn’t toned down at all.

And yet, this is at its core, a love story. While there is a sense that Abby could be using Owen in order to get herself a new companion, it is apparent that she likes him enough to impress him, even going as far as to eat some candy while knowing full well the pain it will cause her. And its moments like these that proves that Reeves fully understands the brief as he delivers a fucked up romance that’s simultaneously warm as a pulsing vein and cold as a frozen body.
Not the superior version, true; but still well worth letting in.

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