Let Me In
Matt Reeves (2010)
As soon I’d booked the ticket, I wondered why. Richard Jenkins is in it but I knew from having seen Let the Right One In, the admired Swedish film of which Let Me In is a swift remake, that Jenkins’s role wasn’t either major or capable of doing much with. I don’t care for vampire movies generally and, although Let the Right One In has some interesting themes, I didn’t like it. According to Wikipedia, there are differences of opinion about whether Let Me In really is a remake of Tomas Alfredson’s picture – there’s a school of thought that it’s rather a re-adaptation of the source novel! The point is surely that Matt Reeves, who also did the screenplay, saw the potential for revising Let the Right One In in a commercially attractive way. In this respect, Reeves has succeeded[1]. (If his motives were as artistic as he claims, does this mean he didn’t think Alfredson had done justice to the book? Seems unlikely.) The setting has been changed from suburban Stockholm to Los Alamos, New Mexico and the opening shots of a train, with lights like a line of fire in the bleak dark landscape around it, are striking. But it was clear pretty soon that the other things I liked about the Alfredson version were not going to be replicated.
The emphatically ominous noises on the soundtrack at the very start – a cross between a repeated doom-laden chord and the noise of a snoring beast – are the first clue. As Anthony Lane noted in the New Yorker, the abbreviation of the title makes for a loss of subtlety as well as words. Let the Right One In intriguingly removes any doubt that someone or something is going to be let in – it implies a matter of choice. Reeves’s three-worder is a less sophisticated, imploring imperative. The faces of the schoolkids who bully the hero Oskar in the Alfredson movie don’t suggest nasty pieces of work. The tormentors of Owen in Let Me In are evidently, boringly brutish. Maybe I was just slow on the uptake with the Swedish film but was it so clear so soon there that the forever-pre-pubertal Eli was a vampire? Here, when the equivalent Abby’s ‘father’ (this is Jenkins) dispatches some unfortunate young man and slits his throat, the apparatus used for drawing off the blood makes it obvious why it’s being collected. (In a startling moment, Jenkins then falls through the ice and spills the precious liquid.) As could be guessed from his acting in The Road, Kodi Smit-McPhee has too much technique and self-awareness to be interesting as Owen. In the first half hour he’s expressive only in the odd moment when he doesn’t seem aware of the camera. As the vampiric Abby, Chloë Grace Moretz looks to have more potential but because Smit-McPhee doesn’t seem at all feminine (he just seems wimpy) there’s no sense of an androgynous kinship that came over through the pairing of the kids (Kåre Hedebrant and Lina Leandersson) in Let the Right One In. Richard Jenkins is affectingly human in the rare moments when he isn’t out blood-collecting but even his presence and that of Elias Koteas (as a police detective) weren’t enough to detain me. Once Abby had attacked her first victim in a thuddingly violent encounter and shown us Exorcist-type glowing green eyes after slaking her thirst, I’d had enough and walked out.
6 November 2010
[1] According to Wikipedia, ‘As of November 2nd, after five weeks in theaters, Let Me In grossed an estimated 11.9million domestically. … The film has grossed over 13.7million worldwide’.