Let Me In

Sometimes I despair of my work habits. I woke up yesterday with no teaching responsibilities, planning to write a chunk of a conference paper that is due soon. I got to my office at 7.30am and promptly re-watched Let the Right One In, streamed instantly on Netflix, and then went out to the movieplex to watch the remake, Let Me In. Watching the Swedish original and the American remake back-to-back was a mistake. Firstly because the original is just a much better film. And secondly because the remake is so faithful to the original — the same scenes, the same images (the same playground equipment, the same dripping pipe), the same shot composition, the same dialogue — that it is all but impossible to evaluate it on its own terms. That is a pity because Let Me In more clearly situates itself within the horror genre and so it necessarily jars when compared to the ethereal beauty and simple tenderness of the original.

I’d link to our comments on the original if I could find them, but as a reminder, the films concern a lonely boy, living with a single mother in a dreary apartment complex, bullied at school, who befriends a young girl (they are both twelve, though, as she puts it, “I have been twelve for a long time”) who moves into the apartment next door with an older guardian who may or may not be her father. She (Eli in the original, Abby in the remake) is a vampire. Her guardian goes out to kill on her behalf and bring back blood. Through his friendship with her, the boy is drawn into her world, watches her kill, learns to fight back against the bullies, and, most memorably, is helped by the girl when attacked at a local swimming pool. That scene, shot with predictably more gore and screaming in the remake, remains wonderful in both versions.

The boy, Owen (Oskar in the original) is played by Kodi Smit-McPhee, Abby by Chloe Moretz, and the guardian by Richard Jenkins, who alone does a better job than his counterpart in the original, showing real compassion for the girl as he shuffles about the apartment putting together the funnel, knives and other prerequisites for a night of killing. Abby and Owen are more substantial, darker in complexion, more talkative, than their Swedish counterparts, so the remarkable images of Oskar, pale skin, blond, straw-colored hair, against a window with nothing but snow outside, are lost here. But the chemistry between the children is still quite powerful. Smit-McPhee seemed familiar to me, but I did not recognize any of his other screen work on IMDB. Chloe Moretz, of course, was Hit Girl in Kick-Ass so it it nice to see her play a quite different role. At one point in both films, the boy asks her if she would like to go steady. She asks how that would change what they already have, as friends, and when he admits that nothing would change, she assents. Moretz carries this moment, when she is simultaneously too young, as twelve-year old, to know what going steady means, and old enough, as a generations-old vampire, to know how important it is to make and keep friends, beautifully. That alone makes this version worth seeing.

[Minor spoilers]The remake cannot keep itself from trying to fill in the backstory. It makes more or less explicit what we guess in the original: that the guardian is a boy she loved in the distant past, and that Owen is destined to fill that role, and will age while she does not. Abby’s apartment is littered with toys and puzzles from an earlier era.

15 thoughts on “Let Me In”

  1. i’m glad you told us the background. i hadn’t guessed it at all. i like the (original) movie better now (i didn’t like it very much when i saw it, unlike the rest of the known world. simon didn’t either, but that means nothing, because we mostly feel the same about movies, which probably means that we should find fresh new partners).

    chris, you really have to work on self-control. vampire films are not even part of your discipline, for gossakes. in the meantime, i take your wife was at home cleaning the house and your kids would have killed to see the movie with you instead were stuck at school. tsk tsk.

  2. Gio, don’t even go into that space about how we divide up domestic responsibilities in our household. Assumptions about gender roles may hold on the average but not in the particular.

    Stepping aside from this specific movie, has anyone else ever watched an original and a remake within a very short space of time? I found it quite exhilarating, and it made me think much more about the original than I did the first time I watched it.

  3. SPOILER ALERT! Does the new film implicitly (as in the Swedish film) or explicitly (as in the Swedish novel) suggest that Abby/Eli used to be a boy back (way, way back) in the day?

  4. SPOILER RESPONSE! Nope. Even less so. The scene when Owen sees Abby in the shower never cuts to a shot of Abby’s body (unlike the equivalent scene with Oskar and Eli). The line “I am not a girl” is used but no more.

  5. Too bad . . . I like the ambiguity of all that identity stuff (and the fact that, at least in the novel, Oskar doesn’t seem to mind).

  6. Nicola and I just finished watching the Swedish DVD (Cate made it halfway through and then bailed, which was probably for the best). I had not seen it for two years (and it is very, very good). I do want to see the American remake but treated myself to a morning out on the town to see The Social Network in the AM. More on that later.

  7. you should be defensive, chris. you are a man who’s being attacked by a woman who doesn’t know you (and whom you don’t know, hence your inability to discern that she’s joking)for something for which men are systematically attacked. if you don’t defend yourself by setting the record straight, who will?

    gawd, jeff, glad cate at least had the good sense of realizing she should remove herself from in front of the screen. and no, you have absolutely no justification for getting defensive.

  8. I wanted to counter the Twilight phenomenon. About mid-way through the film, Cate asked when the vampires were going to battle each other. I worked very hard to stifle my laughter. Nicola enjoyed it very much.

  9. I watched this last night and, for the most part, agree with Chris’ assessment. Still, I think there are enough subtle differences between the two films to generate some interesting comparative analysis. What intrigued me most was the film’s decidedly more “queer” approach to the material (however buried it might be for the average teenage spectator). Early in the film Owen is discovered peeping into his neighbors windows (via a telescope). He moves back and forth between a man in his early thirties working out with weights and a couple in another apartment fighting and making up. What is most intriguing here, for me, is the events that take place in the couple’s apartment. After their fight, the man (whose back and face are turned away from the camera) begins to caress the women, pulling open her robe and fondling her breast. What was intriguing for, scopophilically (and yes I know I just typed that word), is how the pleasure derived by the boy can be read as quite ambiguous. One might assume he is identifying with the male, but all signs suggest he is identifying with the woman (the one receiving pleasure). This trope later resurfaces in Owen’s relationship with Abby. Abby, who is far more androgynous in appearance (and the director in his commentary track admits that he left the whole gender backstory issue “open” in terms of choices made but always refers to Abby as a boy as per the novel) plays the more aggressive, masculine role in this story of star-crossed lovers (yes, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is referenced at least three to four times). She is the Romeo to Owen’s Juliet. I found this stuff quite fascinating–subversive even. There is even a scene in a classroom where the kids are watching the Zeffirelli film adaptation of R&J which is ripe for some theoretical unpacking. Still, though it is good enough to warrant discussion, the American remake does pale in comparison to the Swedish original.

  10. sorry for the dismal grammatical and structural mistakes above . . . I was latching onto an idea and then looked up and my class was set to begin in eight minutes!

    . . . decidedly “queer” approach . . .
    . . . intriguing here, for me, are the events . . .
    . . . What was intriguing, scopophilically . . .

  11. i watched the original a couple of nights ago and really, really liked it. such a tender and heartbreaking film about the vulnerabilities of childhood–the vampire stuff is really secondary (and i was interested to read via wikipedia that the source novel has far more back-story that goes into all that; i’m glad the film left it out).

    the kids are great, but so are the adults; and i also really liked the story-line of the group of older friends whose lives are destroyed by eli and her guardian. the bleak, cold setting seems at first to entirely match the film’s worldview but that group, as well as the two kids in the bully’s gang who clearly don’t want to be bullies, as well as the gym teacher, hold out some hope of warmth.

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