"LET ME IN" ☆☆☆
I was on the fence about this American remake, a noirish horror drama very much in the same style (and faithfully adapted near verbatim) as the original, the 2008 Swedish "Let The Right One In," about troubled kid Owen who befriends odd, nice Abby, the reclusive girl who lives next door to him in the same apartment complex, in a New Mexico winter in 1983. She only comes out at night and barefoot in the snowy complex playground where lonely, distressed Owen retreats and where both him and Abby will eventually meet. The hook, as it is in both versions, is that she is a vampire, with a solemn adult caregiver who pass themselves off as father and daughter.
I wanted to like this film more, and at times like it less. Director/writer Matt Reeves US version "Let Me In" (a US title change I prefer, actually) succeeds at recreating, and mostly staying true to, the chilly atmosphere and tone of that Swedish film, with the intriguing characters, visceral horror, and that effective ever-present bleak undertone that made that first film work so well. And "Let Me In" surprises us from the Swedish version. It works as a good horror movie. Before the lights went down, the theater previewed several upcoming horror/thriller potpourri, and I felt that most of them won't come close to the terror that their trailer might represent. "Let Me In" scares you, and it's probably this fall's ticket to the best horror shocks you'll get in a cinema right now. I had less feeling for movies like "My Soul To Take" or "Paranormal Activity 2" or "Saw 3D."
However, what I was on the fence about is that "Let Me In" often plays it softer than it's predecessor (a beef most critics had, and most who rated the film positively), and why that hits so hard is it does it with Owen and Abby, the two leads who we need to get seeped into. The scenes with them weren't deep enough, or frightening enough, or consequential enough, that it would matter, and in contrast the scenes with Owen and his sadistic school bully, Kenny, are better and work as half of the film's suspenseful punch. Whenever Kenny gave Owen the evil eye (and it was evil), and confronted him in the school locker room, and composer Michael Giacchino cued a deep single brass note every time, I feared for the worst. (SPOILER! And the ending when it seemed that Owen had won over Kenny and his posse, he plans back with vicious and near deadly force in a school indoor pool. Of course, as predicted, Owen is rescued and it doesn't go well for them.) The two adult leads, one played by Richard Jenkins as The Father and the other by Elias Koteas as The Policeman investigating the several murders linked to Abby, don't get as much thought put into them, or have as many scenes as they should. The Father maybe, but he leaves the film way too early, and less so The Policeman, who when he finally exits I didn't really care. (CONTINUED SPOILER 2! To me, both ended up just as more bodies on the mounting pile that Abby rakes.)
And what I liked mostly included that the film was recreated near flawlessly in tone and color palette, often better from the original, of dull blue interior and meek orange exterior (used to extreme in director Guillermo Del Toro's whimsical fantasy/horror mishmashes), and over-coated in absolute bleakness (the DP for this movie is Creig Fraser, who I think mostly imitated the work of DP Hoyte von Hoytema from the original, but while giving this film a crisper look. I liked the lens flares, honestly). And the setting transfers very well here with the original in a Sweden suburban, and here a New Mexico suburb, both snow laden and dismal. I like that you couldn't tell one setting from the other. Or one film from the other! And Hey, if you don't recognize the actors and have the film subtitled you might mistake this for the original! Is it all that bad that it mimics "Let The Right One In" to a fault, scene for scene, line for line, and picture for picture? Nah. Except that maybe why have a remake? Eh, I don't mind. In fact, I would have liked Reeves' film better had he gotten those leads right. He might have wanted to co-write the script or hand it off to someone else, is my thought. (In my defense, why I would have liked this version more is I saw "Let The Right One In" dubbed. It was terrible. I knew it killed it, but I never gave the movie a second chance in Swedish.)
(CONTINUED SPOILER 3! I also want to mention the political transfer now being Reagan's America of "good vs. evil." Reeves made a good choice here, and he makes a lot of good ones in the movie. Actually, my hopes rose in the first ten or so minutes of movie, from the first shots of a snowy, fogged, mountainous New Mexico, with swirling, whining sirens emerging from the distance, to the out of focus inserts of a brutally harmed man in a emergency vehicle hightailing it to the hospital, all the way up to The Policeman's sour visit, with Ronald himself on a TV screen talking it up about the "evil empire" that is the Soviet Union in his famous NAE speech...That meeting took place in March, so it's safe to say, in the dead of winter, that it was actually playing on everyone's TV's the time this movie took place. "Let Me In's" best is in these first ten minutes, after that great, fogged opening wide-shot and the last after this poor man takes a plunging fall out the hospital window to his death. The movie's opening had the kind-of European slow, calculated, terrified pace that the rest of the movie, though shot that way, seemed to lack. Reeves has the right aesthetics, but not the right punch. Those kids! Even though the kid actors, Kodi Smit-McPhee of "The Road," and Chloe Moretz of "Kick-Ass" fame, are two of the hottest young actors around, and they really are terrific here. They just needed to make us feel for them.)
I'll mention the score here: As much as I love Michael Giacchino, he could have killed half the music in this, because it mostly killed the suspense. Silence, at most times, works best. Except for that deep brass note! (CONTINUED SPOILER 4! Another great suspense scene when Owen stands up to Kenny, and the subsequent discovery of yet another body, at a frozen pond, was killer with Michael's music!)
(CONTINUED SPOILER 5! And, I think the one scene, if there was one, that left me more satisfied with "Let Me In" than I was is it's final, which ended the way the original did, too, and which I liked more here. That Owen is now in The Father's position. That it's a sad, viscous circle that maybe Abby can't seem to holt. Owen is damned, but blissfully destined he thinks, to look after Abby for as long as he lives. Or horrifically meet The Father's seemingly eventual deadly fate. )
"Let Me In" works as a genre horror film, and it jolts you and holds you, and never as much with Owen and that bully, (and should have with Owen and Abby) and not near as much as that near final scene in the pool, which was in the original, but was held for so long in this one I feared it would never happen. I was glad, and terrified, it did. (CONTINUED SPOILER 6! Of course Abby was going to save Owen and brutally murder his school enemies. It shows that they were meant to be, and that Owen is doomed to take care of Abby forever.)
Ah, vampire romance. Suck it Edward!
No comments:
Post a Comment