Let Me In (2010)

Between Twilight and True Blood, you’d think people would be sick of all this vampire romance, and, if the boxoffice numbers are any indication, maybe they are. It’s a shame, because Let Me In is a much more mature vampire romance, not in that it has nudity or risqué themes, but in that the film displays far more restraint, skill and grace than the modern vampire movie, crafting a far more ambiguous and thoughtful vampire film.

And the twist is that the story is about two young kids. Owen (Kodi Smit-McPhee) is the strange boy who doesn’t fit in and often ends up as the subject of bullying. He fantasizes about fighting back but doesn’t have the gumption. That changes when he meets Abby (Chloe Moretz), an odd girl who moves next door to him. What he doesn’t suspect is that Abby isn’t just an oddball like him, but actually a vampire.

The film is a remake of the cult favorite Swedish film, Let the Right One In. This American remake stays faithful to the original film, but makes a lot of changes that improve on some of the glaring flaws of the original. The film spends more time focusing on the core relationship between Owen and Abby and less on the various lives of the adults that actually have little bearing on the story.

It also doesn’t tone down any of the more mature and unsettling elements of the film, especially the depiction of violence surrounding and initiated by kids. If anything, the film goes a bit too far and makes the film a bit too intense on the front end. It never becomes quite the bombastic action-fest that Hollywood often turns subtle foreign films into, but it could learn a bit more from European restraint.

In fact, one might even argue that Matt Reeves shoots a better film than the original. He creates a far more intimate and unsettling visual space and finds a way to condense story from the original film into pure visual narrative. He also crafts some fantastic sequences involving a still camera stuck in the back of a car which makes for one of the most disorienting and unsettling car sequences captured on film.

But Reeves also wants to get a bit artsy with the film. There are a plethora of extreme close up shots of just about everything. This is so much the case, that there are hardly any establishing shots in the entire film. This works at creating a sense of entrapment throughout the film but it also proves needlessly confusing for audience members when a film simply lingers on a close up on an object that isn’t even distinguishable.

Another problem is the length of the film. Even though the film ousted a lot of the boring parts of the original Swedish film, it still has a subplot that lags and doesn’t add much to the overall story. Also, there are a lot of scenes that seemed stretched, lingering, staying long past their welcome. This could simply be fatigue from having already seen the original film and essentially seeing the same exact scenes again but with different actors, but the film doesn’t flow as well as it could.

As someone who saw the original and didn’t particularly care for it, the changes here still don’t change that. It’s better than the original, but if you’ve already seen the original you probably disagree and probably already made up your mind about whether or not you will see this film. It’s an interesting core relationship, a questionable one, but one that this viewer doesn’t find engrossing as it should be. Still, it’s nice that there’s a film that handles the human-vampire relationship with some dramatic gravitas instead of a heavy dose of cheesiness.

© 2010 James Blake Ewing