Let Me In
“Eat some now, save some for later…”
by Jonathan McDonald
“Is there such a thing as evil?” Owen (Kodi Smit-McPhee of The Road) asks his estranged father over the phone one night. He has good reason to ask this question, as the new friend he has made–perhaps the only friend he has had for a long time–subsists on human blood. She lives with an old man who makes mysterious trips in the middle of the night only to return with plastic jugs filled with blood. “He wasn’t my dad,” she tells Owen. Her name is Abby (Chloë Moretz of Kick-Ass), and she has been alive for a very, very long time. Both children are lonely and vulnerable, although Abby has had more time to adjust to this situation, not to mention she possesses the preternatural strength needed to protect herself. While Owen may one day grow out of his weakness into maturity, they each lack things that the other can provide for them, however temporarily.
Owen is that common archetype of American cinema: the young, weak boy who is frequently bullied and who receives no help from his parents or teachers. He lives with his alcoholic and cheaply religious mother in an apartment complex in Los Alamos, New Mexico. At school he is tormented by a group of much larger bullies who seem motivated by boredom and self-loathing and even a touch of malevolence. But why does Owen ask his father about evil only after seeing his new friend drink human blood, and not after the unending poundings he receives at the hands of his peers? If she is after blood, it is only to survive; the bullies are after blood out of spite.
Abby is reminiscent of the character Claudia from Interview with the Vampire, a similarity which may or may not be coincidental. Like Claudia, Abby is a vampire trapped forever in a prepubescent body, unable to become a woman. (Claudia, though, was significantly younger in Rice’s novel than the twelve year-old Abby, although both actresses portraying the parts in the film adaptations were about the same age.) Still, Abby does not seem quite so concerned about this as Claudia was, when she fumed for a century about her lot in life. There is something more disturbing going on with Abby when she asks Owen, “Would you still like me, even if I wasn’t a girl?” As the first (Swedish) film adaptation of John Ajvide Lindqvist’s novel Let the Right One In makes clearer, the young vampire girl may not be a girl at all.
This sexual ambiguity is in many ways central to the characters of the story, but it is strangely repressed in the American remake, where the sexuality is fairly straightforward. In the original story, Eli’s (Abby’s name in Lindqvist’s novel) protector became attached to her because he was a pedophile; here he seems to have started down his dark path from a much more innocent origin. Likewise, Eli is implied to be a castrated boy, Oskar (Owen) visits his father and his father’s “friend,” and the future relationship between the two “children” is bound to be disturbing on many levels. I say this repression is strange not because I consider the original source material to be necessarily more real and mature, but because one of the running commentaries throughout the movie is about the repressive effects of conservative politics and religion on American life. Ronald Reagan is ubiquitously talking on the television (mirroring the Cold War atmosphere of the novel), and Owen’s mother is always saying her distinctly banal prayers at the dinner table. In one scene she has fallen asleep in front of the television that asks, “It’s 10 PM. Do you know where your children are?” They are off behind the barn learning things they might be better off not learning.
Owen may be in love with Abby, but it’s not the kind of love that can end anywhere good. It is obvious that they will end up in codependence, if they are not there already. There is a scene where Abby intentionally makes herself vulnerable to the boy after losing her protector, and he is forced to make the choice to protect her. Is this love or psychological warfare? The final scene with its haunting song implies a dark and hopeless future for these lonely children who think they have found security. If this is not a horror movie, I don’t know what is.
Rating: Impressive
Written on October 6, 2010 by Jonathan
Points of Interest: Chloë Moretz, Drama, Horror, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Matt Reeves, On DVD
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