Movie Review: Let Me In (2010)

Let Me In (2010)

Directed By:
Matt Reeves

Starring:
Kodi Smit-McPhee: Owen
Chloe Moretz: Abby
The Father: Richard Jenkins
The Policeman: Elias Koteas


Rating:

Really Tied the Room Together

If Let Me in were an original film, were its own beast, it would have been quite the exorcise in atmospheric horror. Beautiful and well-acted, director Matt Reeves' film has a confident rhythm, a languid, meditative flow that has all but left American horror films, which are now obsessed with music spikes and elaborate tortures, viewing their characters as little more tan pieces of meat to be hung on hooks. But Let Me In isn't original. In fact, it is nearly a shot-for-shot remake of the 2008 film Let the Right One In, a Swedish film that was effortlessly beautiful, well acted, and served as quite the exorcise in atmospheric horror, a genre that doesn't get much play these days. As a shot-for-shot remake, Let Me In serves either as an experiment by the director or an attempt at cashing in by the studio, rightly convinced that most Americans, who lavish millions on movies that barely require thought let alone reading comprehension, were scared away from the original by the subtitles. The controversy surrounding the dumbed-down subtitles pressed to early DVD copies of Let the Right One In suggest that Let Me In is a beautiful, somewhat tributary attempt to suck a bit of money from the crowd that has come to oddly eroticize vampires and, as such, there are problems in translation.

The film takes place in 1983, dead in the middle of a New Mexican winter. A suspected serial murderer (Richard Jenkins) is held in a hospital room, having rendered himself mute and disfigured just before capture in the aftermath of a failed kidnapping. A police detective (Elias Koteas) walks into the hospital room to tell the man that his days as a satanic killer are over, that his friends, who had avoided capture for so long, were next. He gets a phone call, walks back to the lobby. A nurse screams while he's on the phone: the man has managed to jump from the window, an apparent suicide. On a pad of paper next to him he left a scribbled apology to "Abby."

Abby (Chloe Moretz) is a vampire, 12-years-old (more or less), and she uses the older man because his way of killing, which involves putting the victim to sleep, is far more humane than hers, which involves feeding on the victim like a shark in open water. We come to understand that Abby and her "father" have moved to this part of New Mexico because the father is getting old, getting clumsy, getting tired of killing. When he returns home one night after a botched job, he tells her this and comes close to breaking down. For a vampire, killing a human is part of the vampire's life cycle. For a human, killing a human (dozens, maybe hundreds of them) weighs heavily on the soul.

At their new apartment complex, Abby meets Owen (Kodi Smit-McPhee), a lonely middle school boy who is the constant target of taunts and bullying at the hands of three larger boys who have no motive for their crimes beyond a desire to be cruel and a faint whiff of homophobia. Friendless and alone, Owen has few passions in life beyond Mrs. Pac-Man, Now 'n Laters, and the pocket knife he hopes will protect him against the bullies. Abby shows up in his courtyard one evening playing hard to get. You tell a lonely kid like Owen that you can't be friends, and you've got a friend for life.

If the original film was a meditation on the disappointment and loneliness of adolescence, about escape from the rigors of a society that is gray and plodding, that focuses on physical perfection and offers nothing to the awkward, the inward, the downtrodden, the remake synthesizes that down to one overbearing and simple question: Does evil exist? Owen asks his estranged father that over the phone after he discovers what Abby truly is, but he gets no answer. Jesus Christ and Ronald Reagan creep in at the movie's periphery, ostensibly as America's token defense system against the tyranny of evil men, but their presence is both unresolved and unnecessary. The movie's answer has nothing to do with God or country or basic moral fiber--evil is squarely in the eye of the beholder, and what one party understands as a satanic ritual Owen sees as a necessary component of his beloved Abby's survival.

While that remains true to the original film, the tone is all off, implicit in the seemingly harmless title change. The difference between "Let Me In" and "Let the Right One In" is stark, the difference between command and advice, the force of will and an implied choice. This film's Abby is indeed a forceful, controlling character, yelling at her "father," looking up into Owen's eyes from a pool of his blood with a snarl and a sadistic glare in her eye. Owen and the father are reduced to pieces of meat, willing suckers in a game Abby has been playing since time immemorial, and whatever innocence there was between the two characters in the original film, the intermingling of longing and remorse, is stripped away.

It doesn't help that Owen is portrayed as a stunted geek. His being bullied around garners sympathy across both movies, but the difference in his choice of outlet is vast. In the original, he keeps a scrapbook of newspaper clippings of violent crimes, an outcast who dreams of perpetrating the same kind of violence on his tormentors. He carves out a tree shouting "Squeal like a pig," imagining those boys at his mercy. Here, Owen is a voyeur, using a telescope to spy on his apartment block; the gym fiend working out to Bowie, the couple arguing before sex. The sight of his neighbor's bare breast is exciting. He carves out the trees with his knife asking "Are you scarred, little girl?" His anger is misdirected in a way that's more creepy than anything, establishing him as little more than an easy mark for Abby's plans.

Along with the shift in tone, Reeves' film simply lacks the artifice of Tomas Alfredson's original. Gone are the sweeping vistas of virgin snow stained with blood, the charming eccentricities of the adults occupying the apartment block, the subtlety of incredibly violent events. The film's four or five instances of extreme violence are amped up for American audiences. Most striking was the difference in the scene that shows the fate of Abby's one victim who is left alive. In the original, the blinds are opened in her hospital room and she bursts into flame. The camera considers her alone, awed by both the odd beauty and implausibility of the event. Here, a nurse gets too close and is also burned alive, body count being the American substitution for awe. There's also a crucial difference in the film's final violent outburst, but it doesn't warrant spoiling things.

What disappoints me the most about Let Me In is its seeming need to paint everything in black and white. It deadened my emotional response to material that previously shredded me, brought me to the verge of tears. When Abby enters Owen's apartment without permission and starts shaking and bleeding, it is supposed to be the moment of great release, where Owen makes his choice, consequences be damned. But the movie does a hell of a lot to establish that Owen has no choice, so Abby's shaking and bleeding signifies nothing, serves as an excuse to get some blood on a perfectly fine KISS t-shirt. That a crucial, second long shot is excised from this version serves only to further deaden the film's potential emotional impact. The complex web of one movie is translated to boy-meets-girl in the other.

Don't let that dissuade you from seeing the movie though. Flashes of brilliance abound here, even if they're lifted, practically verbatim, from the 2008 film. If you haven't seen Let the Right One In, Let Me In will probably be a satisfying experience. It probably isn't fair to grade one film in terms of another, but the shot-for-shot approach invites comparison and, if you've seen the original, you'll quickly find this to be a painstaking imitation of the effortlessly brilliant. I was left hollow, wanting to see the original again, and a film that has that effect, no matter how good it looks or how well it's acted, can never be anything more than mediocre.