Acouple years ago, Swedish director Tomas Alfredson uncorked a creepy, violent and touching vampire flick called Let the Right One In, about a co-dependent relationship between a wimpy kid and a little girl who happens to be a vampire.
It clicked in ways that Twilight and its ilk could never manage, locating the dark and gothic horror at the heart of vampirism, but also the basic human need to connect, no matter what the differences. Plus, it was scary, funny and loaded with atmosphere. Not to mention Swedish subtitles.
Fast forward a few years, and Hammer Films (yes, that Hammer Films) serves up an English remake, relocated from icy, remote Sweden to icy, remote Los Alamos, New Mexico. Let Me In stars Kodi Smit-McPhee (the kid in The Road) as Owen, a lonely 12-year-old with absentee parents who are heading for divorce in the early ‘80s, and Chloë Moretz (Hit Girl from Kick-Ass) as Abby, a girl who looks more goth than Kristin Stewart could ever hope to be. Seated on an icy jungle gym one night, hooded, barefooted, Abby’s like an ageless crow, surveying her prospects. She spots Owen, who’s carving up a tree in frustration over getting beaten up every day in school. “We can never be friends,” she warns this total stranger out of the blue. “Who said I wanted to be friends?” Owen answers, beating her to the punch.
But they do become friends, and this weird bond somehow occurs amid some of the most disturbing vampire behavior onscreen in quite a while. Not many adolescent boys, for instance, would still want to go steady if their GF started lapping up blood from the floor like a hungry kitty cat. Shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and True Blood may play gore for ironic laughs, and the Twilight series has staked the “forbidden love” angle as its own, but Let Me In uncovers its own icky truths about human bonding.
Directed by Matt Reeves (Cloverfield), this is that very rare thing: a decent remake. This is because Reeves chose to follow the “beats” of the original (and John Ajvide Lindqvist’s screenplay) obsessively, down to the faintest blood pulse. The tone and feel mimic the original: the setting is still the ‘80s (though instead of ABBA, you get David Bowie, Culture Club and Blue Oyster Cult on the soundtrack); it takes place in some godforsaken wasteland where people don’t seem too upset that teenagers are disappearing left and right. (People go missing every day, after all.) There’s the universal cruelty of kids harassing other kids, here played to the hilt with a bully who refers to Owen as “little girl” and inflicts the most painful wedgie ever shown onscreen.
Not all the directorial choices work. Reeves seems still in thrall of CGI effects left over from Cloverfield, and he makes Abby’s transformation from sad little girl to bloodthirsty beast too literal, too abrupt. We don’t need to see her scamper about like a CGI wolf or a bug on a wall; subtlety worked perfectly fine in the original, adding a chilling creepiness by suggesting (rather than showing) the buckets of gore, the flying limbs. Here, it seems Reeves felt the audience wouldn’t sit still without a vulgar display of power. Ironically, the viciousness of Abby’s attacks undercuts some of our sympathy for her plight.
But at the core is the bizarre relationship between Abby, who says she’s 12 (“more or less”) and Owen, who like many a wimpy kid dreams of power and vengeance. Reeves plays down the androgyny of Abby and Owen (though both actors seem pretty androgynous) and their weird asexual bonding, as when Abby confesses: “I’m not really a girl.” “What are you then?” Owen asks. “I’m nothing,” she shrugs.
Parents and adults here are depicted as uncaring, oblivious at best. Owen’s mother’s face is never clearly shown; she’s only photographed from the neck down, or shown curled up on a couch, empty wine glass nearby. Owen’s dad, too, is just a distant voice on the phone, not offering much sympathy or understanding when Owen asks him: “Do you think evil exists?”
The only one who seems to notice that something is amiss is a police detective (Elias Koteas) who’s investigating the arrest of a man who’s burned his own face with acid during a botched kidnapping attempt. This would be the older man who Owen saw moving in next door with Abby one evening, toting a large cargo box and not much else. The odd father-daughter couple seem to argue every night, a weird dynamic that Owen struggles to understand. Here, Richard Jenkins gives yet another fine character actor turn as the “father,” an aging companion whose sole duty in life consists of securing fresh blood for Abby on a regular basis. He’s tired, though, and getting sloppy. His fate, we’re led to understand, is the fate of anyone who falls under the thrall of Abby, who herself remains eternally youthful.
It’s all standard vampire stuff, even down to the lore about vampires not being allowed to enter a home unless granted permission by the occupant (hence the movie’s title); yet here it’s given new life, new depths of pain, pathos and creepiness. Almost a century ago, F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu showed us how insectival and animalistic the vampiric impulse could be. Let Me In does this one better by showing how such a horrific urge can actually coexist inside a very human, sympathetic vessel. Moretz and Smit-McPhee have a chemistry that goes beyond the usual standard longing and desire of vampire movies, because it’s more innocent, prepubescent, locked in time. In certain ways, that makes Abby’s predatory nature even more disturbing: she only enlists companions her own age, after all. She feeds on youth to retain her own semblance of youth, but really it’s just to go on un-living forever. “Are you a vampire?” Owen asks at one point. Abby answers, almost apologetically: “I need blood to live.” Ultimately, it’s just her inhuman nature, and this makes Let Me In somehow more compelling than a lot of the fang-banging claptrap in our midst.