Movie Review: Let Me In

It's tough being 12-years old. Especially when you have a borderline-alcoholic mother, get bullied constantly at school, have no friends, and constantly observe your neighbors through a telescope while acting out serial killer revenge fantasies in your room. Such is the life of Owen. Once he befriends Abby, a girl who just moved in next door, things start looking up. Well, not really. She's a vampire, you see, and that can put a damper on some bonding potential.

But, Let Me In does a pretty solid job of showing that being a vampire is very similar to being an ostracized 12-year-old. Neither of them have any real connections with people outside of their parental figures. Neither are allowed much freedom (Owen's mother demands that he stay in the courtyard and Abby can't go...anywhere), and both seem to have lost a vital part of childhood: carefree excitement. I find it a little too on-the-nose that Owen's wallpaper in his bedroom is a shot from the moon's surface, looking at the Earth. Isolation, it seems, is well known to these two adolescents.

Let Me In is a remake of the Swedish film Let The Right One In. American audiences are, apparently, easily bored by extra words. I hesitate to classify either of these movies as "horror" because the focus is more on the emotions and relationships of the characters. It is required that you believe these two children are actually capable of loving each other for the story to work. While the Swedish version was, in my opinion, better at conveying this type of isolation and connection, it should be noted that the American version does not fail completely. Visually, it's almost an exact carbon-copy of the original.

Matt Reeves is to be commended for this faithful adaptation. When it was first announced that "the director of Cloverfield" would be remaking an obscure, beloved foreign film, a lot of people blanched at the thought. He has shown that he has an incredibly cinematic eye for this sort of material (when given the budget to support it), and I was very pleased that he didn't have any "boo-scares" at all. I particularly hate when a horror film seems so completely unsure of its own material that it has to rely on shocking the audience with sudden sound cues, as if the entire orchestra had slipped off their chairs at once. Reeves has proven that a faithful and confident adaptation is something to be proud of, even if it doesn't completely hold up to the original. For what it's worth (and if you haven't seen the original) this is a product to be proud of.

Score: 4 out of 5
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