Fantastic Fest '10: Devin Faraci Wrestles With The Mimicry Of Matt Reeves's LET ME IN!

Let Me In, Matt (Cloverfield) Reeves' remake of the modern classic Let the Right One In, raises an important philosophical question: just what the hell is the point of remakes anyway? Reeves' film is well made, well acted, looks great, is often moving and, for people who have never seen the original, will be a revelation. But for those familiar with Tomas Alfredson's delicate and chilling film, Let Me In is an intriguing mimick, rarely doing anything of its own, and never actually breaking any new ground. This review is written for people who have seen Let The Right One In, so if you haven't, beware of some spoilers to follow. If you haven't seen the original (afraid of reading, perhaps?), just know that Let Me In is a film you should see because it faithfully reproduces the best parts of the original, and that the unconventional love story between a young boy and a centuries old vampire girl is touching and sort of heartbreaking. Reeves has moved the action to the United States, setting the film in the New Mexico town of Los Alamos, which sees some snowfall during the year (but keeping it in the early 80s). To me this was one of the many surface details Reeves took that didn't make a ton of sense. In the original film the crisp, white, frozen landscape represented Eli's frozen childhood, but the Los Alamos snow is thin and dirty looking; lit by yellow sodium lamps, none of the snow looks like it could be eaten, if you know what I mean. I guess there's a minor plot mechanics reason for the snow - we see Abby (that's Eli in the new movie) walking around in it barefoot, which makes us realize there's something off about her - but surely there would be other ways of getting that information across. What Reeves does well is streamline the story; he treats Let the Right One In like a draft, and he trims or removes what didn't work the first time around. I love the original, but the drunken group of friends who surround the story are mostly filler. Reeves replaces them with a cop, played with a muff-destroying mustache by Elias Koteas. This makes a certain sense - a cop would be investigating local deaths, which saves time in establishing why the drunks were getting interested in Eli - even as it feels sort of conventional. But even though the drunk friends story was kind of a drag in the original, it did lead to a beautiful moment that Let Me In loses, and which drastically impacts and weakens the thematic elements of the film - in the original the woman who was bit by Eli and began changing into a vampire chooses to immolate herself in the hospital, a sad counterpoint to Eli, who continues to murder others to live. The woman makes the choice that she'd rather not go on. There's a woman who is turning into a vampire in the remake, but her immolation is accidental - and she burns a nurse to death with her, an example of the heightening of violence and 'impact' in the remake that feels needless. That change is a big problem for the film because the one thematic element Reeves tries to make his own is to recast the story as an examination of good and evil, with Ronald Reagan on TV talking about there being evil in the world and Elias Koteas thinking the killings are perpetrated by a Satanic cult. By removing a woman choosing NOT to be a bloodsucker, Reeves takes away a layer of complexity behind Abby's morality. We like the character and understand that she's doing what she needs to do to survive... but we never see someone else make an alternative choice. If there is one place that Let Me In really improves on the original it's in the casting of Richard Jenkins. The actor brings an incredible level of sadness to the role, his hangdog face showing us years of sadness and emotional torment. Showing it so well, in fact, that a scene where Abby shows Owen (this film's version of Oskar) a picture of her and a young Jenkins it's overkill. We already got it. Jenkins has a tough role - he's in love with what appears to be a 12 year old girl - but he handles it with dignity and grace. A quiet scene in the kitchen between he and Chloe Moretz is almost stunning in its subtlety. Again, there's no way to complain about Let Me In on a technical level - Reeves has crafted a terrific film here, and he honors the quiet stillness of the original in a way no one expected. Chloe Moretz is fine as Abby, but simply can't match the spooky look of original actress Lina Leandersson. While Moretz is certainly a better actress (Leandersson was dubbed over because Alfredson wasn't happy with her performance), she doesn't have that otherworldly look, or the haunted eyes. Kodi Smit-McPhee is great as Owen, even though the script has toned down his budding serial killer tendencies (a need to make the kid more palatable to mall audiences, I suppose). The two young actors anchor the film, a tough task at the best of times, and I think they do remarkable work. But in the end they're doing remarkable work in a finely tuned simulacrum of the original. There are some new flourishes that work - The Father's method of murder is great and reminiscent of classic urban legends about serial killers - and the scene where he gets caught is remarkable and fresh and leaps and bounds above the original. I would have liked to see more of that. But many other scenes are just beat for beat remakes of scenes from the original, and sometimes shot for shot. Some of the shot for shot scenes are weird because they're not such iconic scenes in the original. Others, like the pool scene, are close to shot for shot, but PUMPED UP for American audiences. Which is too bad, because the pool scene in the original is actually a remarkable example of restraint in action, and that restraint is lost. There's little restraint in Michael Giacchino's score. Omnipresent and often maudlin, about 80% of the score irritates. There's a lovely choral bit that he uses which fits perfectly, but the intense scenes are scored bombastically, lending the early bullying scenes way too much heft. Owen getting pushed around by the bad kids becomes somehow life or death, missing out of the sad reality of the original bullying scenes. That's a lot of nitpicking, I guess, but I watch Let Me In and I don't see Matt Reeves in it. I see Tomas Alfredson all over the place, but this feels like karaoke, not even a cover song. Extraordinarily good karaoke, but Let Me In never becomes Reeves' own work, and instead is happy to hit all the same notes that we liked in the original in the same ways that we liked them in the original. Not a bad movie by any means, but one that never makes a point for its larger artistic reason to be. -- Devin Faraci