Let Me In (2010) I can hardly believe I'm just getting around to posting a Halloween season review on this one, considering it's one of my all time favorite horror films......
As much I admire "Let The Right One In", the 2008 Swedish film that "Let Me In" is a remake of, I still prefer this Americanization by director Matt Reeves ("Cloverfield", "The Batman").
The performances, the visual craft shown in the filmmaking and the startling moments of sheer horror stay with me still......for reasons I'll now outline.....
Very few film directors attempt walking a perilous tightrope between horror and heartbreak.....creating scenes and characters you fall in love with while at the same time scaring the crap out of you.
No easy task. That's why today's horror movies keep it simple and safe.....give 'em a gore-drenched geek-fest fit for a Friday night at the multiplex. Load 'em up with jump scares (the laziest of all techniques), and gallons of blood gushing out faster than in that elevator from "The Shining". And don't forget to throw in the wink-wink meta jokes......
"Let Me In", however, doesn't do any of that. Like a precursor to those celebrated horror art-films like "The Witch", "Hereditary" and "The Babadook", it's dead serious in its story and the atmosphere of dread surrounding it. The film sucks you into it and proceeds to work you over.
The storyline's simple and primal...... Owen, a terribly lonely, bullied 12 year old boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee) befriends Abby, a new neighbor who looks about the same age. She can walk barefoot in the snow, her stomach growls with hunger and she urges Owen to fight back against the trio of vicious school bullies who've made his school days a living hell.
But Abby's been Owen's age for decades since being turned into a vampire. She travels around the country with 'The Father',(Richard Jenkins) an adult protector-enabler who's only posing as a father figure while he goes about the business of cutting fresh throats to feed Abby's thirst.
The surprisingly touching and tender development of the Owen-Abby friendship coincides with the 'The Father's coming undone from his years of blood procuring. (He's been Abby's companion since his own adolescence.) When his attacks on further innocent victims go terribly awry, Abby's forced to do her own human hunting, touching off a chain reaction of death and horror.
None of this story could even remotely work for an audience unless it had two gifted young actors playing the kids. And did it ever have them.
McPhee's Owen takes pathetic vulnerability to new hurtful levels. And Moretz, who's gone on to become a major star among young adult actresses, pulls off a near impossible task - she makes your heart ache for her and then scares you senseless.....sometimes all within the same scene.
And as I pointed out earlier......no easy task.
Matt Reeves direction maintains a continuous aura of crushing gloom and impending carnage and Michael Giacchino's score, filled with low ominous pounding, accentuates the images with the same dexterity of Bernard Herrmann's Hitchcock music.
'Tis the season for horror films and BQ says anyone looking to start off their fright-fests with a 5 star (*****) Find Of Finds.....let in "Let Me In.".
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