Was it the title? The oblique ad campaign? The lack of name actors? An unfamiliarity with the source material? Maybe the unnerving early scene with 12-year-old Kodi Smit-McPhee in his bedroom, wearing nothing but underwear and a creepy, semi-transparent serial-killer mask, brandishing a kitchen knife and spying on his neighbours with a telescope?Whatever the reason behind it might have been, Let Me In’s lackluster box-office performance is one of the great injustices of the cinematic business year. This remake of the great Swedish vampire film Let the Right One In is arguably an even finer film than its much-loved predecessor, a strange, haunting fable that contains scenes of great violence but which leaves you instead with a sense of overwhelming sadness as we contemplate the helplessness we feel in the grip of our desires, and the sacrifices we are willing to make for love.
Do I need to recapitulate the plot? A young boy, the constant target of bullies at school, largely ignored by his alcoholic mother, strikes up a friendship with the strange girl who has moved into his apartment building with a man who appears to be her father. Slowly the boy realizes that this girl, who has no friends, who doesn’t attend school, who cannot enter a room without being invited inside first, who can walk barefoot through the snow without ever getting cold, and who he finds himself falling in love with, is actually a vampire, and her “father” has killed countless people to supply her with blood.
Let Me In director Matt Reeves sets the film in 1983 (it's a much more successful version of the effect Peter Jackson was going for in The Lovely Bones), and perhaps part of the reason why I responded so strongly to it is that in 1983, I would have been only a couple of years older than the film’s hero, and I can vividly recall seeing so many of the film’s production details first-hand: car doors with those pop-up locks, like golf tees; cumbersome TV consoles, broadcasting flickering, staticky images from a coffin-sized block of fake wood; greasy-haired grade-schoolers in unfashionable clothes; cassette tapes of David Bowie’s Let’s Dance. And the bullies. Maybe Reeves showed that part of childhood — the painful, humiliating paralysis that comes with getting picked on and feeling like it will never stop happening — with such withering accuracy that he only gave the core horror audience (which, let’s be honest, is disproportionately full of nerds) unpleasant memories.
If Let Me In differs from Let the Right One In in any significant respect, it’s in the way it portrays the vampire girl. In the original, the young actress Lina Leandersson was truly a singular, goblinlike presence — her character may have once been a little girl, but you got the feeling that her girlish traits had nearly entirely fallen away, so that she was now more creature than human. In the remake, Chloë Moretz’ vampire girl seems considerably younger, perhaps only a couple of centuries old, like Kirsten Dunst in Interview With the Vampire, frozen in prepubescence, young enough to still remember how she might have behaved all those years ago when she was still human and maybe played with other children or spent rainy afternoons solving puzzles in her bedroom. I like both conceptions of the character, although the attack scenes in the American version suffer from a certain herky-jerky, computerized fakiness that isn’t a problem with the Swedish version. On the other hand, Richard Jenkins’ soulful performance in the remake as the vampire girl’s broken-down grown-up companion makes that relationship even more strange and heartbreaking and tragic than it was in the original. Let Me In might be the only vampire movie that’s ever made me cry.
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