Let Me In

It is movies like Let Me In that make you thankful that a Hollywood remake of the likes of Chan-Wook Park's Oldboy is off the cards. If Hollywood lacks the courage to include the pivotal scene regarding the prepubescent vampire's gender featured in Tomas Alfredson's Swedish flick, Let The Right One In, then it certainly lacks the gonads required to take on the pinnacle of Chan-Wook Park's revenge trilogy. For although the scene is confronting, it is important as its absence renders all of Abby's (Chloe Moretz) ambiguous references to her gender moot. It is symptomatic of the film as a whole, a film that takes few risks, aligning itself to the stock conventions of Hollywood horror film making.

Sometimes low budget is better as it forces the film maker to rely more heavily on the quality and delivery of story and less on the spectacle of the employed cinematic devices. Let Me In fails to realise that the story is less about vampirism than it is about two lost souls finding each other. It takes an original idea and makes it derivative, applying stock horror conventions to a story that possesses a measure of morbid beauty and even pacing, creating instead a kind of Carrie with vampires. In the best American tradition, it overdoes it. Bigger is better. It's the cinematic equivalent of brick walling music - take the original source and push all the levels up to maximum. The result is less dynamism and less subtlety for the sake of more bang: violins shriek to flag every suspenseful moment; when Abby gets her vamp on she turns into Linda Blair from The Exorcist with the agility of a CG spider monkey; references made to Owen (Kodi Smit-McPhee) at the beginning of the film suggest a possible budding Michael Myers; we now have a good ol' cop drama sub-plot; and the story is crassly restructured into a retrospective for the purposes of delivering some drama to the audience right off the bat, implying that we lack the patience to endure a slow build narrative. It's ironic that the devices employed to hasten the pace results in a movie which feels 30% longer!

In isolation, Let Me In is a half decent American horror movie but in light of its source, the missed opportunity is blatantly apparent. It's a movie lacking in bravura; a movie that knows its audience well and preaches to it. This strategy may play directly to the box office take but it lacks artistic merit and in time will pale in comparison to its predecessor.