Let Me In

“Everyone asks Steve King, 'How do you feel about Hollywood ruining your books?' And Steve says, 'They're not ruined – there they are on the shelf, right there.'”

– George A Romero, Halloween 2006

From the off, Matt Reeves' remake of Tomas Alfredson's adaptation of John Ajvide Lindqvist's novel Låt den rätte komma in (Let The Right One In), was in for a hiding. Had it been too different, it would have been a travesty, and if it was too faithful, it would have been a pale Xerox. Several critics have already used the word “pointless” to describe it, but, given the spate of Platinum Dunes remakes that have so far needlessly cluttered the multiplexes (Nightmare On Elm Street, Friday The 13th, The Hitcher), I feel Let Me In is an unusual case, in that there is a point in remaking it.

Let's face facts: the vast majority of English-speaking cinemagoers will not see Alfredson's film. Even in the UK, where it was lauded, the Swedish original took less than £2m, which was about as much as it took in the US. Cynics say that the “point” is simply money, which isn't true on that count, since the global box office for the original added up to less than $10m and Let Me In's US distributor, Overture, is hardly a major studio. It might just be that its producers saw another market for the same story, and it's funny that the same people making tutting sounds about such a “cash-in” are looking forward to the Coen brothers' remake – for that is surely what it is – of True Grit.

At best, then, I was hoping that Let Me In would simply acquit itself as a shot-for-shot equivalent, and the not-too-exciting trailer suggested pretty much that. But at Empire's Movie Con event in August, the film's UK distributor, Icon, showed a scene – personally chosen and prefaced with a filmed intro by Reeves himself – that grabbed my attention. It was a scene that wasn't in the original, and it really, really worked. I'll come to it later, but I began to wonder if there was more to Reeves' version than seemed possible. And having seen it, I can confirm that there is.

Even though so much is the same, Let Me In doesn't take its blueprint for granted, and it actually benefits from Lindqvist's decision to set the story in the early 80s. For US viewers, the location is now a snowy Los Alamos, the famous bomb-testing site in New Mexico, and Ronald Reagan is in the White House, which deftly picks up the strands of Cold War paranoia that Alfredson threaded so delicately through his interpretation. And although, as in the original, the focus is a lonely little boy – Owen (Kodi Smit-McPhee), who lives in a poor part of town with his divorcing mother – Reeves does not make any attempt to create a more Hollywood-friendly character.

Owen, in fact, is quite the little freak, playing out his pubescent aggression with a penknife, venting his disturbing frustration on imaginary victims, sneering, “Are you scared, little girl?” while stabbing viciously into the thin wintry air. He's bullied at school, forgotten at home, and when a strange, barefoot little girl moves in next door – Abby, played by Chloe Grace Moretz – Owen strikes up a rapport with her, even though she explicitly, and pointedly, tells him that they must never be friends.

If you've seen the original, you'll know what happens next. But if you haven't, Let Me In has a lot to offer. For a start, it's actually a horror movie, in a way the original wasn't. Alfredson, not a genre buff, fashioned something truly unique from Lindqvist's novel, and all the words used to praise his version have reflected that. But his vision was more romantic, with only an opaque suggestion that Eli is after Oskar's soul. In Reeves' version, though, all the trimmings have been stripped away, and there's a very, very Hammer-style morality tale being told. In Alfredson's version, the Abby figure is perhaps a perverse blessing, but in Reeve's retelling she is most definitely a curse.

Key to this is the role of Richard Jenkins as Abby's ”father”. In Alfredson's film, he's a shadowy protector, most likely a paedophile, but in Let Me In, he is a tired, worn, beasted slave. Through the walls, Owen thinks he hears him bullying his friend, but the reality is that Abby has the whip hand. And in the very striking scene I was talking about (it involves a moving car), he all but quits as her keeper – which is pretty much where the film starts, in a subtle but telling shift (I think) from the original.

This is what I most enjoyed about Let Me In, the sense that this kid, as sad and dejected as he is, is walking into an apocalypse of his own making, made all the worse by his belief that Abby's encouragement – especially with regard to tapping his innermost capacity for violence – is really a manifestation of love. It's not. Let Me In is, at heart, a film about addiction and codependency, and where Alfredson's film posited that as a might-be, Reeves hammers it – no pun intended – home. The last scene, so ambivalent in the original, here is a much more sinister and emphatic end; far from freedom, it is a significant nail in a young boy's coffin. Appropriately enough for a story inspired by a Morrissey song, Le Me In reminded me of another of the singer's cryptic lyrics – in fact, a whole chunk of The Smiths' 1984 hit What Difference Does It Make:

The devil will find work for idle hands to do
I stole and I lied, and why?
Because you asked me to

I wonder if Matt Reeves has heard it...