Let Me In

Let Me In (2010) is set in New Mexico in the winter of 1983. Owen, twelve and beaten at school every day, becomes friends with a girl who has moved into his building. Abby goes out at night, walks barefoot in the snow, and the old man she lives with kills people for her. The source is John Ajvide Lindqvist's novel and the 2008 Swedish film Let the Right One In. Matt Reeves made this two years later, unusually soon for a remake. His clearest change is the position of the old man. The Swedish film leaves who he is and where he came from unresolved; here a scene with a photograph album shows Owen's future directly. It raises the charge and lowers the ambiguity. The film was one of the first major productions of the revived Hammer Film Productions, the studio behind British horror of the sixties and seventies. Kodi Smit-McPhee plays Owen, Chloë Grace Moretz plays Abby, and Richard Jenkins the old man. It runs 116 minutes. Good for: quiet horror, performances by children, and snow and loneliness. Less good for: the violence is sudden and graphic, and the bullying is genuinely hard to watch. For anyone who has seen the Swedish film this version is more explicit and less uncanny. One digital effects sequence breaks the realism of everything around it.