Let Me In (2010) - by Faro

It is a dangerous thing to try to remake a film, especially one as subtle and emotionally affecting as Let the Right One In (see RAW’s review on March 11, 2009). But dangerous challenges can also be the catalyst for fantastic new growth. The original Scarface and Cape Fear are fine films, but their recreations are terrific new objects that explore very different emotional territories. Of course, far too often a film remake is nothing more than a confusing mess like Tim Burton’s two failures Planet of the Apes and Willy Wonka. Or a film remake can end up being a bloodless stylistic homage, like Gus Van Sant’s Psycho, or a well-intentioned but ultimately over-blown like Peter Jackson’s King Kong or Cameron Crowe’s Vanilla Sky. At least Crowe had the good sense to keep Penelope Cruz at the heart of his remake. So what is Let Me In?

Well, Matt Reeves also has the good sense to retain most of the big set-pieces of the original. It is the 1980’s during a cold and snowy winter in a small town that is psychologically and economically depressed, people are mysteriously being killed and drained of their blood, and at the center of the story are two young children developing a strange intimacy… strange, for many reasons, not the least of them being that the young girl happens to be a vampire. And, on its own as a distinct entity without any evaluation against the original film, this is a fine little horror film for all of those wonderful reasons. I mean, you would have to be an idiot not to pull something interesting out of that set up, and the actors that are assembled do an admirable job with what they are given. Plus, there is a nausea inducing moment of inspired camera work inside a flipping car that is vaguely reminiscent of Cuaron’s brilliant use of long-take in the nightmarish car chase in the woods that occurs halfway through Children of Men. Overall, this remake is patient and creepy and everyone speaks English.

Of course, that is the real reason why this film got made… because there simply is no money to be made from a terrific film where everyone speaks Swedish, but if you can recreate that film and let them speak English, then who knows how much money could be made! It could be this generation’s The Exorcist! But don’t be fooled by that oh-so-satisfying lack of subtitles… Let Me In does not match the complexity and character development of Let the Right One In, and will ultimately be forgotten in a year or two. And coming so close on the heels of the original, with such a calculated profit motive at the center of its creation, I feel it is fair and appropriate to judge this remake against the original and not as a stand alone object.

So where to begin in this comparison? Well, it is obvious before the movie even begins how much is lacking in the recreation just by examining the title of each of them, with the original being lifted from a Morrissey lyric about the dangers of emotional engagement… i.e. Sartre was half-right when he said Hell is other people, but it is also Hell without them… while the remake is a simple imperative statement demanding entrance. That hardly has the same resonance, even though they awkwardly try to attain that same complexity by explicitly putting it in the screenplay at several key moments. But shoe-horning the title phrase into emotional moments does not necessarily create emotion, and it is a far cry from the multiple meanings the original title is able to achieve without every being directly uttered.

The actors do a very good job overall, but they are given far less to work with in this iteration of the narrative and they are undercut by some deeply damaging changes. One of the worst is the visual addition of special effects during the little girl’s attack of adults. When she leaps onto them she suddenly becomes a spindly-legged speed-demon horror instead of a little girl. These nightmarish special effects undercut our ability to see her as a 12 year old girl which ultimately impairs our ability to relate to her relationship with the little boy

Also damaging are the changes made to the secondary characters like the little boy’s mother, who becomes a soft-focus non-entity whose only features seems to be her simplistic Christianity and wine-bottle alcoholism. This makes her a metaphor and a cliché, rather than a relatable character in the original who is revealed to be an ineffective mother cocooning the little boy in loneliness. Her vague mumblings about good and evil in the world are meant to dovetail with extended clips of Regan describing the Evil Empire, but it all just comes off as heavy-handed historical/moral contextualization.

And sadly, this speaks to the increasingly leaden interactions of all the characters in this remake, because the scenes don’t add up to more shades of nuances for them as the film progresses and so everyone remains nearly the same as when they began the film. The beauty of the original was its pitch-perfect focus on the increasing intimacy between the boy’s lonely naivety and the girl/vampire’s hungry experience which is then deepened in correlation with all the other characters living out similar journeys of need and suffering. Keep in mind, the secondary characters in the original are not simplistic shapes and hollow ideas like in the remake, they are all breathing and bleeding with idiosyncratic distinctions.

A disheartening example of what has been lost is found in the subtraction of suicidal self-awareness on the part of the sexualized adult female when she ends up in the hospital. In the original she realizes she has been tainted by the vampire blood, and so asks for the blinds to be opened knowing that the sunlight will end her life in a blaze of fire. In the remake the death/judgment by fire becomes nothing more than the accidental result of a nurse just going through the motions of opening the blinds as the sun rises… which seems an apt metaphor for so much of the narrative reconstruction here.

Perhaps it is best to end this review as the remake ends, with a ridiculous reliance on a candy jingle that has been shoved down our throats during the entire remake lest we miss its double-meaning purpose at the end. The little boy’s favorite candy, as we have been told many times, is Now and Later. And as he sits in the train at the end of the remake with the little vampire in a box at his feet, speeding off to an unknown future that in the original was bathed in the film’s first soft-hued colors and a multi-layered narrative ambiguity, here he stupidly sings the jingle to himself… ‘Eat some Now, save some for Later’… and seems totally unaware of the intended gallows humor irony of this statement!!!

In the original the narrative subtlety matched with the little boy’s inexperienced desire for companionship made this believable, but this remake has made it blatantly obvious to the little boy and to the audience that the “father” was in fact once a little boy himself and was seduced into a life of aiding and abetting just as the little boy is being seduced right now. Yet despite all the force-fed clues he still seems blithely unaware of where he is heading. The original had left the ending scene’s complexity more hidden and uncertain, and had built such a pure bond between the children that it was possible to leave the theatre (as many did) feeling that it was a happy ending.

But no matter when you realized more of the complexities of the future to which that train was speeding toward, you were still left uncertain if the little boy had let the right one in to his heart. The original asks us, from multiple character perspectives, whether loneliness or bloodletting is the more difficult weight to carry? In this remake, you find yourself more concerned that the little boy is simply and idiot and thus unaware of the obvious dangers of hitchhiking with an emotionally manipulative 12 year old vampire… but perhaps no more of an idiot than you and I are for having paid $12.50 to see this two-dimensional money-grabbing rehash of a better film that just happened to have suffered in the marketplace because it wasn’t in English.