Review:
The title of “Let Me In” might be understood as a plea to the audience. Even if you think you’ve had enough of the vampirization of popular culture — “Twilight,” “True Blood,” “The Vampire Diaries” and so on — find room in your heart for this one. And though it teases out the usual horror movie sensations of dread and anxiety and eyes-averted disgust, this movie also makes a direct and disarming play for affection, eliciting in viewers something akin to the awkward, resilient tenderness that is its subject.
Vampire romanticism is nothing new, of course. Millions of us, not just teenage girls, have followed the courtship of Bella Swan and Edward Cullen through every deep breath and smoldering glance. But the love story in “Let Me In,” between two 12-year-olds, one of them a blood-craving undead pixie named Abby, is both more intense and more innocent.
The subtext of the relationship is not sexuality, as it is in “Twilight” or “True Blood,” but rather the loneliness of children and their often unrecognized reservoirs of rage. Abby (Chloë Grace Moretz) and her pal, a trembling, big-eyed boy named Owen (Kodi Smit-McPhee), are fragile and quiet but also capable of horrifying violence.
“Let Me In,” Matt Reeves’s worthy and honorable remake of “Let the Right One In,” Tomas Alfredson’s Swedish adaptation of the novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist, is disturbing because it takes you inside the minds of its young main characters, Owen in particular. Ignored and harangued at home by his mother — his parents are in the midst of a divorce — Owen is easy bait for bullies at school. He compensates for his powerlessness by bingeing on candy and shutting himself in his room, where he spies on the neighbors with a telescope and acts out sadistic serial-killer fantasies in front of the mirror.
“Are you scared, little girl?” he whispers, brandishing a kitchen knife and calling his imaginary victim exactly what his locker room tormentors call him.
The little girl who does arrive in Owen’s life — moving into the next apartment in his shabby little complex with a shambling, put-upon adult guardian (Richard Jenkins) — becomes the boy’s ally in a pact of mutual protection. “We can’t be friends,” she tells him when they first meet in the courtyard where he likes to sit alone at night, eating Now-and-Laters.
But of course they do, even as their moments of easy companionship are punctuated by a series of gruesome crimes, committed by the man Owen assumes is Abby’s father in order to feed her appetite for human blood. When the poor man messes up these hunting missions, as he often does, Abby must gather her own prey, which gives her (and Mr. Reeves) a chance to show off some creepy computer-aided monster skills.
The story holds a few surprises, but what makes “Let Me In” so eerily fascinating is the mood it creates. It is at once artful and unpretentious, more interested in intimacy and implication than in easy scares or slick effects. Mr. Reeves also made “Cloverfield,” a movie whose genuine formal cleverness was overshadowed by an annoying pseudo-documentary gimmick — recalling “The Blair Witch Project” and anticipating “Paranormal Activity” — as well as by some very annoying characters.
And the pics will be on top, k? Cuz' I have no idea how to place them...
OK, by now, I'm not sure if the pics are up or after my comment about I don't know how to move pics thing, but now I think it's bottom. So yeah, I know there's loads of Abby Owen pics, but, they're the main characters, so screw you. Lolz, I'm just joking. Anyways, I hope you'll take the time out to check this movie out, it's a really great show, I name it a full price movie. And uh, I know some of the pics look cacat-ed and I'm sorry.... But, just bear with it. Thanks
If any of you don't know what a full price movie means, well, it means, it's totally worth ur money. Gotta go now. Bbye!
