Film Reviews: 'Let Me In'

Lonely Boy Finds Friend in Blood-Craving Pixie

By A. O. SCOTT
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com
September 30, 2010

Chloë Grace Moretz in “Let Me In.” (Overture Films)

The title of “Let Me In” might be understood as a plea to the audience. Even if you think you’ve had enough of the vampirization of popular culture — “Twilight,” “True Blood,” “The Vampire Diaries” and so on — find room in your heart for this one. And though it teases out the usual horror movie sensations of dread and anxiety and eyes-averted disgust, this movie also makes a direct and disarming play for affection, eliciting in viewers something akin to the awkward, resilient tenderness that is its subject.

Vampire romanticism is nothing new, of course. Millions of us, not just teenage girls, have followed the courtship of Bella Swan and Edward Cullen through every deep breath and smoldering glance. But the love story in “Let Me In,” between two 12-year-olds, one of them a blood-craving undead pixie named Abby, is both more intense and more innocent.

The subtext of the relationship is not sexuality, as it is in “Twilight” or “True Blood,” but rather the loneliness of children and their often unrecognized reservoirs of rage. Abby (Chloë Grace Moretz) and her pal, a trembling, big-eyed boy named Owen (Kodi Smit-McPhee), are fragile and quiet but also capable of horrifying violence.

“Let Me In,” Matt Reeves’s worthy and honorable remake of “Let the Right One In,” Tomas Alfredson’s Swedish adaptation of the novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist, is disturbing because it takes you inside the minds of its young main characters, Owen in particular. Ignored and harangued at home by his mother — his parents are in the midst of a divorce — Owen is easy bait for bullies at school. He compensates for his powerlessness by bingeing on candy and shutting himself in his room, where he spies on the neighbors with a telescope and acts out sadistic serial-killer fantasies in front of the mirror.

“Are you scared, little girl?” he whispers, brandishing a kitchen knife and calling his imaginary victim exactly what his locker room tormentors call him.

The little girl who does arrive in Owen’s life — moving into the next apartment in his shabby little complex with a shambling, put-upon adult guardian (Richard Jenkins) — becomes the boy’s ally in a pact of mutual protection. “We can’t be friends,” she tells him when they first meet in the courtyard where he likes to sit alone at night, eating Now-and-Laters.

But of course they do, even as their moments of easy companionship are punctuated by a series of gruesome crimes, committed by the man Owen assumes is Abby’s father in order to feed her appetite for human blood. When the poor man messes up these hunting missions, as he often does, Abby must gather her own prey, which gives her (and Mr. Reeves) a chance to show off some creepy computer-aided monster skills.

The story holds a few surprises, but what makes “Let Me In” so eerily fascinating is the mood it creates. It is at once artful and unpretentious, more interested in intimacy and implication than in easy scares or slick effects. Mr. Reeves also made “Cloverfield,” a movie whose genuine formal cleverness was overshadowed by an annoying pseudo-documentary gimmick — recalling “The Blair Witch Project” and anticipating “Paranormal Activity” — as well as by some very annoying characters.

With “Let Me In” the director demonstrates, in addition to impressive horror movie chops, a delicate sensitivity and a low-key visual wit. Much of the action takes place in semi-darkness (the sunlight-allergic Abby’s preferred ambience), and Mr. Reeves and his cinematographer, Greig Fraser, warp and blur the images, using shallow focus to convey the isolation and disorientation of the vulnerable children. Michael Giacchino’s score glides effortlessly from jarring sonic freakouts to lush swells of melodramatic orchestration.

All of it — and the quite haunting performances of Ms. Moretz and Mr. Smit-McPhee — allows you to see how Abby and Owen construct their own world in the face of various threats and misunderstandings.

There is, in addition to the bullies and the parents, a dogged cop played by Elias Koteas, who thinks some kind of Satanic cult must be responsible for the bloodletting. There is not, refreshingly enough, a lot of pseudoscholarly demonological lore. No Volturi or rival werewolf clans; no excursions into the sociology or mythology of the undead; no Internet searches turning up images of medieval woodcuts and esoteric Latin text.

No Internet at all, for that matter, since “Let Me In,” following the lead of the original, takes place in 1983. David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” is on the radio, along with Culture Club, and Ronald Reagan is on television, lecturing the nation about good and evil. The period evoked seems to be a sad, anxious time. The setting — Los Alamos, N.M., perhaps for reasons having more to do with local tax incentives than with anything else — is drab and wintry, like the Sweden of Mr. Alfredson’s original, though the emotional tone is more American emo than Nordic melancholy.

The early-’80s cultural touchstone that “Let Me In” brought to my mind — indirectly and perhaps perversely — was Steven Spielberg’s “E.T.” Mr. Smit-McPhee looks a bit like Henry Thomas, and both play boys from broken families living in the Southwest whose lives are changed by the intervention of a supernatural (and potentially immortal) friend. That one is a warm science-fiction fable and the other a dark horror film makes the similarity more striking, since both movies begin with, and build their fantasies against, the terror and fury of childhood.

“Let Me In” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has swearing and gore.

LET ME IN

Written and directed by Matt Reeves; based on the novel “Lat den Ratte Komma In” by John Ajvide Lindqvist; director of photography, Greig Fraser; music by Michael Giacchino; production design by Ford Wheeler; costumes by Melissa Bruning; produced by Simon Oakes, Alex Brunner, Guy East, Tobin Armbrust and Donna Gigliotti; released by Overture Films. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes.

WITH: Chloë Grace Moretz (Abby), Kodi Smit-McPhee (Owen), Richard Jenkins (the Father) and Elias Koteas (the Policeman).


Related Link (Review of 'Let The Right One In'): http://movies.nytimes.com/2008/10/24/movies/24righ.html


Let Me In

BY ROGER EBERT / September 29, 2010
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/


"Let Me In," like the Swedish film that inspired it, deals brutally with the tragic life of the vampire. It's not all fun, games and Team Edward. No lifestyle depending on fresh human blood can be anything but desperate. A vampire, like a drug addict, is driven by need. After a certain point, all else is irrelevant, and the focus is on the craving.

The film is remarkably similar in tone and approach to "Let the Right One In," and it is clear that the American writer-director, Matt Reeves, has admiration for the Swedish writer-director, John Ajvide Lindqvist, who made the original. Reeves understands what made the first film so eerie and effective, and here the same things work again. Most U.S. audiences will be experiencing the story for the first time. Those who know the 2008 version will notice some differences, but may appreciate them.

The core story remains similar. Owen, a boy on the brink of adolescence, lives a lonely life in a snowbound apartment complex with an alcoholic mother, hardly seen. He is bullied at school by a sadistic boy, much larger. A girl named Abby and her father move into the next apartment. She announces "I can never be your friend," but some latent kindness causes her to feel protective toward the lonely and abused child. Abby is a vampire, but vampires have their reality forced upon them, and having lived for a long time, may have seen much to make them pity the living.

The story focuses tightly on Owen (Kodi Smit-McPhee) and Abby (Chloe Moretz, of "Kick Ass"). Two other adults are of consequence: Her "father" (Richard Jenkins), who can hardly be her father and was probably, long ago, in Owen's shoes. In vampire lore, he is her Familiar. The other adult is a local policeman, played by Elias Koteas as a saturnine and solemn man. He's investigating a serial killer in the region. Where there are vampires, there must always be serial killers.

The night and the cold are also characters. The film is shot in chill tones of blue and gray, Owen and Abby have uncanny pale skin, there is frost on his breath, but not on hers. She doesn't feel the cold, we gather. Or the warmth. Many of the events are the same in both films, although the U.S. version adds one surprise that comes at a useful time to introduce frightening possibilities: This is not a safe world, and bad things can happen.

Both films end with scenes set in a swimming pool at night. The windows, high up under the ceiling to admit sunlight, are dark and cold. We can imagine the clammy tiles, the chill in the locker-room where Owen is so often picked on. The bullies call him a "girl" and seem obsessed with seeing his genitals — homophobic cruelty that casts a sad light on the first film's revelation about Abby's body. Both these characters feel sexually threatened or inadequate. It may only be me, but as I recall indoor swimming pools at night in winter (at high school, or the YMCA), they always had a whiff of mournful dread.

In the "Twilight" films, sexuality is treated as a tease. The handsome Edward is cast as a sexy but dangerous threat, who manfully holds back from sex with Bella Swan. She's tempted, but the films are cautionary fables about the danger of teenage sex. In "Let Me In," sex is seen more as a troubling encroachment on privacy. Owen and Abby for their own reasons quail from intimacy and contact, and their only sensuous moments involve the comfort of close, tender hugs.

Where this will lead is easy to guess. Owen will move into Abby's life as her next Familiar. She will protect him. Among the things she will save him from is the necessity of growing up and functioning as a normal male. She will control everything. Thus Bela's sweet masochism will become Owen's hunger to give over control. To be a servant is the price for not being a victim. Those hoping to see a "vampire movie" will be surprised by a good film.
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