Stylish and effectively creepy, if mostly secondhand, Let Me In may bewitch moviegoers who didn’t see its Swedish predecessor, Let the Right One In. Cloverfield director Matt Reeves’ cinematic renovation doesn’t make any significant improvements, but it’s a reasonable English-language substitute for the chillier, less sentimental original.
Relocated from a Stockholm suburb to Los Alamos, N.M., the remake is set in the same season (winter), era (the early 1980s) and place in the color spectrum (blue). The premise is identical: A 12-year-old boy, bullied at school and neglected by divorcing parents, meets a girl of the same age who’s just moved into the apartment next door. “I can’t be your friend,” Abby (Kick-Ass‘s Chloe Grace Moretz) tells Owen (The Road‘s Kodi Smit-McPhee).
Why not? Reeves begins partway through the story and then flashes back, so by the time we watch Abby introduce herself to Owen it’s clear that she’s not just a home-schooled loner. She walks barefoot in the snow and sleeps all day in an apartment barricaded against light, and the grim, disheveled man who might be her father (Richard Jenkins) goes out at night to collect human blood. But he won’t for much longer.
After one of the man’s serum-scavenging forays goes wrong, Abby is left without anyone to protect her from hunger, sunlight and the cop (Elias Koteas) who’s investigating strange deaths in the town that brought us the A-bomb. But Abby still has the (superhuman) strength to handle the four boys who are tormenting Owen. If the two kids can’t be friends, they certainly have the makings of a partnership.
The director adds some nice touches, such as depicting Owen’s alcoholic, evangelical Christian mother as a ghostly near-presence. (She’s almost as negligible as the grown-ups in a Peanuts TV special.) He also neatly captures a frantic getaway attempt in a single take, an almost-slapstick sequence that’s shot from a careening car’s back seat, and pulls the viewer into the action.