On 'let me in' and choosing

“Do I have a choice?” One of the characters, a grim fatherly type played by Richard Jenkins, despairingly replies to his twelve-year-old vampire ward, when she asks him if he’s going out to get her some blood. It didn’t seem like he had a choice. She was a powerful creature; he was an old man under her spell. What could he do except to obey her wishes?

Well, he could do what he had been doing for years with the vampire: He could choose.

In Let Me In, twelve-year-old Owen (Kodi Smit-McPhee) is a lonely boy who takes to hanging out by himself at his apartment complex’s yard. He is bullied in school and his parents, both of whom are more or less ignoring him, are getting a divorce. When a new girl moves in next door, no matter how weird she is for, say, not wearing any shoes outdoors in winter, she immediately becomes a happy distraction.

Abby (Chloe Moretz), who looks Owen’s age, moves in one late evening with a man who appears to be her father. She strides confidently across the yard, her bare feet leaving marks in the pristine snow, followed by the man, who is lugging a huge chest.

It doesn’t take long for her to make contact: One night, small knife in hand, Owen’s playing a fantasy he’d been nursing against the bullies at school. Abby, as if summoned by his dark aggression, suddenly appears behind him and strikes up a conversation. But she gives him an early warning: “We can’t be friends.”

Such warnings are hardly noticed at the beginning of practically anything in life; they might as well not have been uttered. It’s as if people have to warm up to awareness, as if people have to be burned by their choices before they learn to listen.

Owen and Abby develop what seems, for all purposes, to be a sweet, innocent friendship. They are quite a pair, this strange and sad little boy with this strange and lonely girl. But to the film viewers and even to the girl, it is is no secret that she is a vampire. Her first kill, which happens early in the film, is the viewers’ early warning: “They can’t be friends.”

But such warnings are easy to dismiss in a movie. Our Twilight-and-True-Blood-fattened hearts look for a little romance, which easily blooms between the young Owen and Abby, as it does, usually, between people who have no one else.

Abby asks him, “Will you still like me even if I am not a girl?” Owen’s confused “I guess” takes us by the hand and pulls us, slowly but firmly, to an ending that we are certain can only be dark—but an ending that twelve-year-old Owen, hard as it may be for us to accept, knowingly chooses.

There is another early warning: The fate of Abby’s guardian. And this brings us back to the question he asks in a moment of despair: “Do I have a choice?”

When Owen first learns that Abby is a vampire, she visits him at his house and asks to be let in. “You have to say it,” she tells him.

“What if I don’t say it?” he asks. He then opens the door wide for her to walk in.

Abbey walks inside the house and starts bleeding profusely—from her eyes, her ears, her nose, what seems like every orifice of her body.

Owen leaps to embrace her and says, “You can come in! You can come in!” The bleeding stops and the only friend he has stays alive.

There is always a choice, it seems, although sometimes, it does appear to be between something and... nothing.

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