Sunday 24 April 2011

Let Me In (2010)

Hollywood has a terrible track record when it comes to re-making foreign films. Even when a foreign director re-makes his own film, as with George Sluizer's The Vanishing (1988) and The Vanishing (1993), the process of putting the film through the Hollywood machine always seems to render the remake blander and more formulaic. Sometimes, the result is laughably bad, and certainly that is the case with the second version of The Vanishing. In other cases the re-make is merely lamentable, and that is how I would describe Let Me In (2010).

The original Swedish film, Let the Right One In (2008), is one of the most riveting vampire films ever made. Its eerie tone and slow moving story, as well as its lonely, despairing characters, make it seem like an unlikely candidate for Tinsel Town treatment. But Let the Right One In became an international hit, at least on the art house circuit, and, probably more importantly, vampires have recently been big box-office in the USA. Hence, the re-make was inevitable. The good news is that Let Me In is fairly painless. The new director, Matt Reeves, clearly understands what makes the original tick. Snowy New Mexico stands in for snowy Sweden. No showy CGI, or love interests, or last minute save-the-day plot developments were forced into the story. Importantly, an intense young actor (Kodi Smit-McPhee) was found, and he ably conveys the lead character's adolescent despair and loneliness (so profound that the living dead seem preferable to the living). The odd, barefoot girl whom he meets, sitting in the barren and frigid courtyard of a housing estate, remains a dishevelled and distant companion.

The most striking difference between the two films is that some of the mystery is taken out of the story. Part of the appeal of the original is its enigmatic nature. It is odd enough having a vampire film set in snowy Sweden. And the Sweden of Let the Right On In is not the gleaming liberal democracy we might expect, but a land of run-down council estates and hopeless drunks. The plot itself explains little, but keeps the viewer guessing, wondering, and worrying. In the ending, when we can just about put the pieces together, the final revelation (which I won't divulge here) is chilling. But in Let Me In there is too much that is familiar, and too much that is revealed, early on and without ambiguity, to the audience. We are not trusted to wonder, and so we are simply shown what-is-what and who-is-who very early on the film. Thus, while the ending is very nearly the same, it is not a chilling revelation, and it has no resonance or impact.

Let Me In certainly isn't a laughably bad or disastrous re-working of Let the Right One In, but, apart from being very impressed with young Mr Smit-McPhee, I was left thinking the only reason to see the Hollywood film is that it is in English, and, if you have any tolerance for subtitles, that is no reason at all.

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