Matt Reeves, “Let Me In”, Hammer Films / Overture Films (2010)
Once upon a time about 25 years ago in a small town somewhere in Reagan-era America, there was a lonely 12 year old boy called Owen (Kodi Smit-McPhee) living in an apartment block with his mom. Mom had just broken up with Owen’s Dad and was trying to cope with the trials of being a single parent in that particular historical period by imbibing equal and large amounts of alcohol and religion. Owen had problems too: his parents were too wrapped up in their issues and inability to cope, shouting at each other over the phone; everyone else in the block kept to themselves; and at school, there were these teenage bullies, Kenny (Dylan Minnette) and his friends, all older than Owen, who bothered the other kids some but reserved their bile for Owen, on one occasion nearly raping him, and most of the time mocking him about being a little girl.
Little girl? One night Owen sees new neighbours – a girl his age and her Dad – moving into the apartment next door to his. Over the next several days – or nights, rather – Owen gets acquainted with this girl, Abby (Chloe Grace Moretz), and though at first they don’t want to be friends – Abby actually warns him off, and he thinks she smells bad – they each discover they have lots in common: they’re lonely outsiders and they need an ally to cope with modern life. So Owen helps Abby adjust to her new life in town and Abby advises owen on how to deal with Kenny and his pals.
Meanwhile the town – Los Alamos, by the way – is hit by a series of gruesome murders in which victims get strung up on trees and poles and drained of their blood by a serial killer so the local police detective (Elias Koteas) investigates and links the murders to Abby’s “Dad” (Richard Jenkins) who winds up in hospital with injuries sustained in a car crash and his face disfigured by acid. The police officer tries to interview the patient but gets called away to the phone by the ward sister; while the fellow’s gone, Abby visits “Dad” through the window, he offers his neck as apology for his recent failures, she drinks his blood and he falls to his death ten storeys down.
Yes, by now you’ve guessed: “Let Me In” is the American version of the Swedish movie “Let the Right One In” and in parts is a remake of the latter movie. Not surprising really, seeing that it’s based on both the novel and the Swedish screenplay, both written by John Ajvide Lindquist. You’d think the US movie would benefit from the best of both worlds, the direct and the indirect approaches, along with some original American touches and details. The result though is a movie that is both weaker and more powerful than its Swedish predecessor: the weakest parts are where it copies the Swedish movie scene for scene, shot for shot, or waters it or the novel down; the strongest parts are the original ideas that are absent from the Swedish film and novel.
There are two themes present that could have lifted “Let Me In” to greatness beyond the Swedish film: to take the first, the relationship between Owen and Abby is more heartfelt and emotional than what Oskar and Eli had; and Abby, at once more girly and more obviously feral than Eli, appears a more complex character than Eli which adds poignancy to Owen’s dilemma when he realises too late that she’s a vampire. Early scenes between Abby and her “Dad” suggest she’s a bully too and a photograph of them that Owen sees suggests she’s been using her “Dad” since he was a young boy. Unfortunately Reeves doesn’t pursue the suggestion of Abby as both sweetheart and cruel mistress hard to the very end so the film’s coda, which could have been the film’s real climax, powerful and ambiguous yet “true” to the novel and the film – Owen only needs to fish out that photo of Abby and “Dad” after tapping out Morse code on the box where Abby’s hiding and start crying – remains an enervated imitation of the Swedish film’s feel-good fairy-tale ending.
The second theme not present in “Let the Right One In” (novel and film) is the notion of escape: Los Alamos seems an uninteresting, generic American small-town where locals apparently care little about its history as a centre of nuclear energy and weapons research and development, and Owen tells Abby that he plans on leaving the place forever one day. If Reeves only realised what a goldmine this is, he would have made Abby the one chance Owen has of escaping to a richer, more fulfilling world, and so Owen’s dilemma of whether to stay with a dangerous friend or not becomes more multi-layered. We would also have seen the attraction Abby held for her “Dad”, holding out a similar promise of freedom. The train trip Owen and Abby take at the film’s end would become a flight to freedom. The escape theme is a distinctively American culture motif and it is hard to understand why Reeves doesn’t make anything much out of it.
Child actors Smit-McPhee and Moretz are excellent in their roles – Smit-McPhee in particular reveals considerable emotional depth in what must be his first lead role. Moretz balances the light and dark aspects of her role well but rather than just being resigned to a monotonous salty liquid diet, she could have been directed to feel conflicted about what she has to do to stay alive, maybe even dislike the taste of blood. The adult characters are under-developed but three should have stood out, even as one-dimensional stock figures: Koteas’s prying police officer should have been a framing device for the whole film right to the very end – the novel itself has such a character – and perhaps he would have provided an objective viewpoint on everything that happens and some comment on the nature of US small-town society and how it deals with violence, crime and social problems. The other two potential stand-out characters are Owen’s apartment block neighbours Virginia and Larry: a couple of early unspoken scenes with them, perhaps detailing their fighting and making up while Owen spies on them with his telescope, could have established them as a counterpoint to Owen’s battling parents. Larry could have provided fodder for Abby as his Swedish twin Lacke did for Eli, freeing the police officer (spoiler alert) to investigate the strange incidents at the swimming pool centre and deal with a missing child report, as in the novel.
Ah yeah, the climactic swimming pool showdown: Reeves relies heavily on the Swedish film for inspiration, using Owen’s viewpoint underwater, and this is a big mistake. For thugs such as Kenny and Co, the way that Reeves deals with them is unsatisfactory, given that this is a Hammer film where subtlety is a foreign concept and we’ve already seen Abby get stuck into several previous victims. I’m of the view that the audience should see Abby rip into the boys with suitable amounts of relish, gore and violence without Reeves’s jumpy cuts and quick edits: this would have been a cathartic moment, good for the audience if too good for the bullies themselves.
Ultimately in trying to make a film that meets the cool Europeam sensibility of “Let the Right One In” and at the same time fulfil commercial expectations and values, Reeves loses the chance to make a great film with a distinctive style, informed by layers of myths and history of midwestern Americana, and melding horror and violence with loss of childhood innocence and the minutiae of everyday life. In its own way “Let Me In” could have been a comment on American social conditions of the 1980’s, some of which still exist today.