As it turns out, Reeves keeps the essence of the shot, but tries to “improve” on it by making it more graphic and aggressive in its violence, a calculated mistake that mars an otherwise surprisingly good film at regular intervals. This does not make Let Me In a bad film or a bad horror film; in fact, once you get past the unavoidable sense that this remake is entirely unnecessary given the structural, visual, and emotional brilliance of Alfredson’s original, it works very well on its own merits. However, Reeves frequently makes the mistake of many a horror director, namely showing too much. Part of the unnerving essence of Let the Right One In hinges on Alfredson’s restraint in depicting the film’s violence, which makes the few moments when he does put it all on screen (especially the aforementioned underwater shot) so impressively shocking. That film is a cornerstone of the “less is more” principle, and while Reeves’ version is certainly more restrained than the majority of current American horror films, it still pushes at places when it should be pulling back, especially given the generally unconvincing nature of the digital effects.

The story, based on a novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist, is almost exactly the same as the original film. Instead of being set in the industrial north of Sweden, Reeves has selected the desolation of Los Alamos, New Mexico, as his locale, which is further isolated by the cold, snowy winter weather and the temporal setting of 1983, which also allows Reeves to snag a pertinent snippet of a Ronald Reagan speech about the fundamental nature of evil and how U.S. history is riddled with it. Kodi Smit-McPhee stars as Owen, a skinny, socially awkward, and deeply angry 12-year-old who lives in a depressing cinderblock apartment complex with his religious mother (Cara Buono), who is separated from Owen’s father and tends drink herself to sleep every night with cheap wine (her face is kept out of frame the entire movie, thus suggesting that she is as distant from Owen as everyone else). Thus, Owen is, in every sense of the world, alone, which makes him susceptible to bullying. Middle school boys have a special gift for sniffing out weakness and punishing it, and Owen has become a daily punching bag for a trio of more developed bullies led by Kenny (Dylan Minnette), whose narrows eyes and thin-lipped sneer portend something more than run-of-the-mill adolescent harassment.

One night, Owen spies his new neighbors moving in: a 12-year-old girl named Abby (Chloë Grace Moretz) and her father (Richard Jenkins). When Owen and Abby first cross paths, she keeps her distance from him and tells him right off the bat that they can’t be friends. However, their paths cross again, and soon they are drawn to each other, sharing the quizzical joys of a Rubik’s Cube and bonding over their shared desire to be left alone. What Owen doesn’t realize, and what is only slowly revealed to us in bits and pieces, is that Abby is an ancient vampire hiding in a little girl’s body and her “father” is really more of a servant who plays the role of serial killer to procure blood for her continued existence. The exact nature of Abby’s relationship with the father character is left deliberately vague for an extensive period of time, but we know that it is both dedicated (he is willing to kill for her, over and over again) and contentious (Owen hears them shouting at each other through the walls, and the father seems consistently exhausted and depressed).

Much of the film focuses on the gradually evolving relationship between Owen and Abby. He is drawn to her simple willingness to be with him and share in his various pleasures (including Now-and-Laters, which make her physically sick), while she is intrigued (and perhaps even seduced) by his innocence and naïveté. When she tells him that he needs to hit back at the bullies--hard--she is dispensing the kind of advice that doesn’t normally fall from the lips of 12-year-old girls, and when he follows through on it he is suddenly faced with both the exhilaration and terror of being able to harm another person, something with which Abby is intimately familiar.

Their relationship has a sweetness and sincerity that gives the film an unusual edge; we are meant to both fear and pity Abby (her vampirism is more tragedy than romantic superpower), which makes our desire to see her and Owen together unnervingly tricky. As their friendship blossoms, they are both in increasing danger: she of being discovered and he of being potentially devoured. Both Smit-McPhee (The Road) and Moretz (Kick-Ass) embody their respective roles impressively: Smit-McPhee is the essence of the gawky, half-finished nature of middle-school physicality, while Moretz commands her body like someone who has worn it for ages, a performative feat that is unfortunately undermined every time Reeves turns on the digital wonderworks and attempts to depict her moving with inhuman speed and agility. It is about the only time you will mistake the film for Twilight, which did something similarly silly, albeit in broad daylight.

Reeves, who started in television and became a protégé of J.J. Abrams’s during his extended stint writing for and directing a few episodes of Felicity, made a name for himself directing the Abrams-produced digi-video monster mash Cloverfield (2008). In that film, Reeves demonstrated a sense of the cinematic that far exceeded the clever, but limited gambit of shooting the entire film from the first-person perspective of a videocamera, and Let Me In allows him to further stretch his visual muscle. Reeves wisely follows Alfredson’s general aesthetic approach of hushed tones, minimal editing, desaturated colors, and a heavy emphasis on contrast and moody shadows, but he also goes one further by dropping Alfredson’s heavy reliance on long shots and structuring the film’s visuals around extreme shallow focus, which turns large areas of each frame into near abstraction. In his screenplay, he expands on the original film with the inclusion of a police detective (Elias Koteas) who is investigating the murders necessary for Abby’s survival, and he also reworks several sequences, the most successful being a botched murder attempt that is scored with Blue Oyster Cult’s ominous “Don’t Fear the Reaper” and climaxes with an end-over-end car wreck shot entirely inside the car. These gambles in straying from the original mostly pay off, and the only time Let Me In shows any crassness is when Reeves pours on the violence and gore instead of cutting away and saving, as Alfredson did so wisely, the best for last.

Copyright ©2010 James Kendrick

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