Let Me In (2010)

Official trailer

Let Me In gets its 8 by being the rarest of things, an American remake of a beloved foreign film that justifies its own existence. Matt Reeves remade the Swedish Let the Right One In just two years after the original, a move that looked like Hollywood opportunism and turned out to be a careful, faithful, felt piece of work. It doesn’t surpass the original, and it doesn’t need to.

It honors it while making small, smart changes that suit a new context, and it’s proof that a remake can be an act of respect instead of theft.

American remakes of foreign horror usually make me groan, and this one is the happy exception. I think Reeves made a patient, sad, frightening film that respects its audience, and the two kids at its center are the best reason to see it. It sits at 8 because the Swedish original still does all of this a little better, and I’d send anyone to that one first.

The story is intact. A bullied, lonely twelve-year-old boy in a bleak town befriends the strange child who moves in next door, a child who only comes out at night, who’s not what she appears to be, and who needs blood to live. It’s a vampire film, a coming-of-age story, and a love story between two children, one of whom is a predator, and the combination is as unsettling and moving here as in the original.

Faithful Without Being Slavish

Reeves understood what made the original work and protected it. The film keeps the central relationship, the wintry isolation, the deliberate pace, and the deep ambiguity about what Abby is and what she and Owen are to each other.

What impresses me most is everything he refused to add: no extra action, no explanation of the mystery, no softening of the dark. The film trusts silence and stillness the way the original did, and I didn’t think an American studio had that in it.

The changes Reeves makes are mostly contextual and intelligent. He relocates the story to early-eighties New Mexico, using Reagan-era religious anxiety as a quiet backdrop. He shifts a few emphases, making the boy’s isolation and the absent adults a little more central. None of it violates the original. It’s a translation instead of a reinvention, and a careful translator’s respect runs through every choice.

Two Strong Child Performances

The film rests entirely on its two young leads, and neither puts a foot wrong. Kodi Smit-McPhee plays Owen as a fragile, watchful, lonely boy, bullied at school and neglected at home, retreating into private cruelties and fantasies. His loneliness is almost hard for me to watch. He’s a child starved for any connection, and that hunger is exactly what makes him vulnerable to Abby.

Chloe Grace Moretz plays Abby, the vampire child, and the performance is a careful balance of tenderness and wrongness.

She’s warm with Owen, caring, and also a predator who has been twelve years old for a very long time and will outlive him as she’s outlived others. Moretz holds both truths at once, the affectionate child and the ancient thing wearing a child’s face. The relationship between the two is the film, and the two actors make it ache.

The Uncomfortable Center

The film’s power comes from its willingness to sit in uncomfortable territory. The relationship between Owen and Abby is tender and sincere, and it’s also, when you examine it, troubling in ways the film refuses to look away from. Abby has likely had companions like Owen before, older men who served her as protectors and providers when they were boys and aged into servants. The film suggests that Owen may be the next in a long line, that what looks like first love may be recruitment.

This ambiguity is the film’s most daring element, and it’s what haunts me about it. It presents a love story and then lets you wonder if it’s a love story at all or a portrait of predation and grooming dressed as romance. The film never resolves the question. The tenderness and the horror sit side by side, and I can’t pull them apart. That discomfort is the point, and the film trusts the audience to handle it.

Atmosphere and Restraint

Reeves and his team create a world of wintry desolation, snow and concrete and the fluorescent gloom of a struggling apartment complex. The film is patient and quiet, building dread through stillness, though when the violence comes it’s sudden and brutal.

A car-crash sequence shot from inside the vehicle is a technical standout, and it’s the scene I’d show anyone who doubts Reeves as a director. Abby’s feeding scenes are frightening because they break the film’s calm so violently.

The restraint is the film’s defining quality. It refuses to hurry, refuses to explain, refuses to comfort. For viewers who want their horror loud and fast this will feel slow, but the slowness is the source of the film’s grip. It builds its frights and its heartbreak by making you wait for them, and the patience pays off in an ending that’s both tender and horrifying.

Is Let Me In worth watching?

Let Me In deserves its 8 as a rare remake that honors its source instead of exploiting it. Matt Reeves protects everything essential about the Swedish original, the central relationship, the ambiguity, the patience, the darkness, while making intelligent contextual changes. Two extraordinary child performances from Kodi Smit-McPhee and Chloe Grace Moretz carry a story that’s tender and troubling at once, a love story that may be a portrait of predation. It loses a step to the slightly superior original and asks real patience of the viewer.

It’s an 8 from me, and a warm one. Reeves protects everything that mattered in the Swedish original, Smit-McPhee and Moretz make that strange friendship ache, and the restraint gives me more dread than a dozen louder horror films. It loses a step to the original and it asks real patience, and those are the only reasons it stops at 8.

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