Hey everyone. Capone in Chicago here.
Beauty is beauty. If something beautiful looks like some other beautiful thing that came before it, does that somehow negate the original? I guess that's what the debate revolving around (more like swallowing up) LET ME IN, the impressive and, yes, similar remake of the Swedish vampire masterpiece Let the Right One In. If I liked Lawrence Olivier's HENRY V, am I not allowed to like Kenneth Branagh's. If I like the visual take that Tim Burton gave to BATMAN, does that erase the powerful drama that makes up BATMAN BEGINS or DARK KNIGHT? Zack Snyder's DAWN OF THE DEAD is easy to love, and I would argue that the recent remake of THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT is better than Wes Craven's groundbreaking original. So, is the fact that LET ME IN comes so closely on the heels of Tomas Alfredson's original (both based on the novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist, who wrote the first adaptation) the part of this equation that bothers people so much? It kind of feels that way.
I picked LET THE RIGHT ONE IN as one of my favorite films of 2008, and I listed it as one of the Top Five vampire movies of all time for a podcast I was on recently, so few people have put their money where their keyboard is on this movie like I have. So when it was announced that CLOVERFIELD director Matt Reeves had written and was directing a remake, I felt the breath leave my lungs. But having seen the new film recently, I had a reaction that was unexpected, to say the least. Reeves has given us an alternate--but not radically different--version of this story of a young boy and his relationship with a friendly vampire girl next door that is as good as the original for quite a few different reasons. Reeves has expanded certain elements, streamlined others, and given his actors room to show the true nature of their characters.
The young boy Owen (played by the young Australian actor Kodi Smit-McPhee from THE ROAD) is portrayed as a bit more of a perv and potential homicidal. He spies on his neighbors with his telescope, and even manages to watch an especially beautiful woman in an apartment across the courtyard having sex. And while his counterpart Oskar in the original film shows such tendencies as well, Smit-McPhee is allowed to show his bloodlust a little more explicitly, with the help of his vampire friend Abby (Hit Girl from KICK-ASS, Chloe Grace Moretz), who encourages him to fight back against a small army of bullies to torments him daily. She's not concerned about his well-being; she's testing him to see if he's worthy of... something. Moretz is incredible as Abby, part subtle temptress, part protector, part nasty creature, and manipulative without appearing so. We get a bit more of Abby's ugly vampire side, a change I'm not sure I agree with, but it doesn't take away anything as much as it doesn't necessarily add either.
The third major player in this unholy threesome is an unnamed older man (Richard Jenkins) who acts as Abby's caretaker but is clearly exhausted from the work. The two move into the unit next door from Owen and his recently single and hyper-religious mom (Cara Buono, whose face we never see clearly because neither does Owen). When he spots Abby talking to Owen, Jenkins' character is seized with jealousy; the way he looks at Abby is clearly with something more than a paternal affection. One of Reeves' biggest changes is adding a fourth player into the mix, a police officer played by Elias Koteas, who is put in charge of investigating what becomes a series of brutal murders and attacks. The fact that the cops were barely a factor in LET THE RIGHT ONE IN always bothered me. Koteas kind of takes the place of a few people in the original and in placed perfectly into the story to bring elements together more satisfactorily.
Reeves also dispenses with the scenes featuring the rowdy drunks at the bar, instead making many of them people who live in Owen's complex. The brutal attack of one woman who actually survives and has an unfortunate incident at the hospital is assigned to the aforementioned pretty lady on which Owen likes to spy. Even the color palette Reeves chooses is dissimilar. The Swedish film was basically boiled down to black, white, and a ghostly blue. Reeves sees the color of 1980s New Mexico (when and where LET ME IN is set) as streetlight orange, and he projects that color directly into the courtyard where Owen and Abby regularly meet on a the saddest jungle gym I've ever seen. But the color is warmer and seems to assist in fueling the relationship between the pair. What seems to get lost in the discussion about either film is that, this occasionally bloody, often tense work is a coming-of-age movie about Owen's first (and probably only) love. And while Moretz is certainly a pretty young woman, Owen falls for her because he senses a kindred spirit, a fellow traveler, and, when pushed, a ferocious killer.
Of the three main characters, Smit-McPhee and Moretz at least equal their Swedish counterparts, while Jenkins actually exceeds what Per Ragnar did with the same character in the original. Jenkins plays the role as a tortured, frustrated, angry man that has been at this never-aging creatures behest for most of his life. And when he sees what Abby is lining up for herself, he simply gives up, spectacularly. Above all else, the thing that LET ME IN remembers and preserves about the book and original movie is that it is so much more than a vampire movie. If Abby weren't a vampire, she'd be a goth girl with a troubled life, and the story would still be extraordinary, thanks in large part of the performances and smart, dialed-back direction from Reeves.
I'm not sure Matt Reeves has won the "Why remake it?" argument, but if we lived in a world where this was every audience member's first exposure to this material beyond the novel, I think LET ME IN would be hailed as a minor masterpiece in genre filmmaking. The fact that it's a remake never really factored into my critique of the movie. It's not a shot-for-shot anything (if you think it is, you either don't remember LET THE RIGHT ONE IN or didn't watch the new movie very carefully), and the overall aura of the work is fairly unique. But sometimes getting there first is enough to upset people about what follows that is similar (that's one of the many themes of THE SOCIAL NETWORK). I don't think remakes are inherently crap. There are many remakes that feel like a sign of the Apocalypse, but LET ME IN isn't one of those movies. It's a haunting, powerful, still-strange work that I'll treasure alongside the Swedish film, and there's no crime in that.
-- Capone
capone@aintitcool.com
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