LET ME IN – matt reeves – 6.4 / 10

As much as I like Let the Right One In, Tomas Alfredson’s 2008 Swedish film on which Let Me In is based, I think there could be some value in remaking it with a bigger budget for mainstream American audiences.  The film is rife with thorny ideas about the perils of childhood and the thrills of first love that beg to be experienced by as many people as possible.  And if it has to be remade in English for that to happen then so be it.  But Matt Reeves’s new version, while managing to hit just about all the same notes as the original (even doing a few of them better), doesn’t hear the music and the whole becomes much less than the sum of its parts.

Both films tell the story of a lonely twelve year old boy, brutally tormented at school, who meets a mysterious, often barefoot, girl who only appears to be twelve (but is actually much much older because she’s a vampire).  The girl (named Abby in this version) lives with an older man (played here by the fantastic-as-always Richard Jenkins) who murders teenagers and drains their blood so that his vampire companion can feed.  Both films get a lot of the small details perfectly right: the small town, early eighties, mid-winter setting, for instance, or the brutal, casual ways in which the boy (Owen in this film) is picked on at school.  But there are two moments in particular that are altered in Reeves’s version that turn the melancholic, deeply troubling ending of Let the Right One In into a totally different animal in Let Me In.

In the original, though it’s never stated outright, it’s made abundantly clear that the vampire girl’s caretaker was, once upon a time, a boy much like Owen who befriended Abby and eventually turned to murder as the only way to keep her with him.  But now, as he faces down the reality of what he’s done in order to remain close to his only friend, he finds that he can’t live with himself.  In the original film’s closing moments, as the young boy runs off with his new vampire pal, the audience knows what the boy doesn’t: that he’s destined to become that tortured old man who doused himself with acid to punish himself for all the wrong he’s done.  It makes the ending tragic and deeply upsetting.

In the new version, Owen stumbles upon an old photograph of Abby and her caretaker from when the caretaker was a young boy much like Owen.  At first this just seems like Reeves wanting to make it clear to the audience what fate lies in store for Owen, making sure that everyone 'gets it.'  But this small moment has much larger implications.  By making Owen aware of what the future holds, his decision to flee with her on the train at the end of the film makes him less a tragic victim of circumstances he doesn’t fully understand and more a complicit partner.  He knows what he’s getting into and decides to go anyway.  On one hand, this change makes the ending of the remake much more disturbing than that of the original.  But it does so in a way that completely betrays the audience’s sympathies and doesn’t quite square up with everything that came before.  Throughout the film, Owen is filled with rage and prone to violent fantasies, but it’s never indicated that this is anything other than a natural outgrowth of being tormented by bullies.  The ending, however, makes it seem as if he’s some sort of budding serial killer.  And the audience, for having aligned with this character for a hundred and ten minutes, feels suddenly betrayed in the movie’s closing moments.  For a film that tries so very hard to be a scene for scene remake of the original, this fundamental change stands out as glaringly inadvertent.

Interestingly, the other moment that completely alters the tone and effect of Let Me In also concerns how much information Owen does or doesn’t have about Abby.  In Let the Right One In, after the vampire girl demonstrates what happens if she enters a human home without being invited in (she bleeds from every orifice), she takes a shower in the boy’s apartment.  Afterward, she steps out of the shower naked, revealing that she has no sex organs.  Thus, when the boy accompanies her on the train at the end of the film, he does so because he wants companionship.  Sex or the possibility of sex never enters into it because he knows that’s not something he can ever have with her.

In the remake, however, that moment is elided.  And so when Owen leaves with Abby at the close of the film, there’s every possibility that he might be thinking of her as more than just a friend, that he might be looking at her as a romantic partner.  Obviously he’s only twelve so those thoughts are probably very muddled and confused, but they’re likely there nonetheless.  For all intents and purposes (especially if you’ve never seen the original), the end of Let Me In plays as if Owen is running off with Abby to have lots of sex and murder lots of people, and doing so willingly.

I know I’m focusing an awful lot on the differences and similarities of the two films rather than judging Let Me In on its own merits.  But by making his remake so similar in almost every way to the original, Reeves is inviting that comparison.  Though there are moments here and there that are done better than in Let the Right One In (the car crash that leads to the apprehension of Abby’s caretaker is particularly impressive), for the most part, Let Me In seems to have as its primary goal simply translating Let the Right One In into English so that people who don’t like subtitles can experience it.  That being the case, the small differences here and there stand out even more.  And when those differences fundamentally alter the tone and themes of the original while simultaneously keeping everything else more or less the same, I can’t help but see Let Me In as something of a failure.  It’d be one thing if the whole film was changed to accommodate these shifts, but here they just seem accidental, making the whole film seem off right at the very end, destroying what had been the most affecting moments of the original.