Let Me In

Director Matt Reeve
Country USA

In Tomas Alfredson’s 2008 film adaptation of John Alvide Lindqvist’s novel Let the Right One In, 12 year-old Oskar is bullied at school and neglected by his divorced mother. A strange, slightly creepy kid, he befriends the new girl in his Stockholm apartment block, Eli, who is even stranger, creepier, and requires fresh blood to exist. A refreshing, wholly original take on the classic vampire story, Let The Right One In took around eleven million dollars at the box office. Claiming, however, that film made only two million, Hammer Films executives decided to remake it, naming the kids Owen and Abby and switching their hair colours.

Why did this film need to be remade? Let Me In, the American version, is actually a lovely film. The casting is, once again, excellent. The pacing and atmosphere spooky. The blood is still red. Some things have been accentuated, others diminished, but they are very much the same movie. There’s nothing I can say, if you’ve seen the previous one, you don’t already know. The budget for special effects has been increased, but doesn’t add much to the overall quality of the story.

Still, this is not the big blockbuster fans of the original film were afraid of. When bands cover songs of other bands they usually change it to make it their own. Sometimes, however, they just play the song exactly as people know it as an easy way to fill out a set. If the reason Eli needed to become Abby was because some tanned guy in a three piece suit believed Americans will only see a movie if the characters have American accents, then this suddenly purposeless film becomes, itself, a member of the ghoulish undead. If, however, Matt Reeve’s new version was actually made because he loved the story and wanted a chance to see Chloë Grace Morentz suck vast quantities of blood… well, I guess that’s cool.