Film Review: Let Me In.

Let Me In (2010)
Starring: Kodi Smit-McPhee; Chloe Moretz; Richard Jenkins; Cara Buono; Elias Koteas; Sasha Barrese; Dylan Kenin; Chris Browning; Ritchie Coster; Dylan Minnette; Jimmy 'Jax' Pinchak; Nicolai Dorian.
Directed by: Matt Reeves.
Colour/116 Minutes/R

Remakes are now just something you have to accept, I guess. Well, their existence and staying power in the industry, at least. Some may never accept the need for them, even if they are good films. It's interesting how many actually are good these days. Some (The Hills Have Eyes, 2006) even improve on the original film. Let Me In, North American remake of the Swedish modern vampire classic Let the Right One In, does not improve much on the original, but it does not disgrace itself either.

A slightly tweaked copy, slightly toned-down in subject matter, slightly less weird as the Euro original. You know the original, correct? A young, lonely boy, and victim of intense bullying, called Oskar, befriends a young girl, called Eli, that moves into his apartment complex, with a man seemingly much too old to be her father. He soon discovers she's a vampire, and they become friends, eventually falling in love. It was both a heart-warming and creepy film. Strange and lonely characters populate a small, isolated, and snowed-in early '80s Swedish town, that is about to become much less quiet than usual. Here the story is set in America, and it's Owen and Abby. Let Me In manages to capture much of the same atmosphere (here in 1983-era Los Alamos, New Mexico) effectively, and it does flesh out the story of the vampire girl's familiar, thus making Owen's ultimate fate much more obvious and horrible.









The real improvement on the original is the focus on Abby's familiar Thomas (Richard Jenkins), and the un-named homicide detective investigating the murders both Abby and Thomas have been committing (Elias Koteas). Thomas and the detective's stories could make for a good film on their own. Really, here I found the heart of this film was not the young couple's love story but the decline of Thomas as a familiar, and the horrible end of the tired detective, who while not a villain, is a threat to our young heroes that must be done away with. Unlike Thomas who meets his end because he can no longer do his job, the detective does his job too well and passes beyond a point he can't come back from, encountering something worse than just a serial killer. The film looks good, it's effectively acted, and it's essentially pointless, but it's also not offensive in the least. The recreation of the pool scene is still quite effective here. I expected something really bad coming into this, but instead it's a good little horror film. It's no wonder the resurrected Hammer Films decided to acquire the rights to this one. Worth renting.