Name: Let Me In (2010)
Item: Let Me In
Rating: 8
Author: Richard Lowe

8 / 10 Matt Reeves

Let Me In earns its 8 by being the rarest of things, an American remake of a beloved foreign film that justifies its own existence. Matt Reeves remade the Swedish Let the Right One In just two years after the original, a move that looked like Hollywood opportunism and turned out to be a careful, faithful, genuinely felt piece of work. It does not surpass the original, and it does not need to. It honors it while making small, smart changes that suit a new context, and it stands as proof that a remake can be an act of respect rather than theft.

The story is intact. A bullied, lonely twelve-year-old boy in a bleak town befriends the strange child who moves in next door, a child who only comes out at night, who is not what she appears to be, and who needs blood to live. It is a vampire film, a coming-of-age story, and a love story between two children, one of whom is a predator, and the combination is as unsettling and moving here as in the original.

Faithful Without Being Slavish

Reeves understood what made the original work and protected it. The film keeps the central relationship, the wintry isolation, the deliberate pace, and the deep ambiguity about what Abby is and what she and Owen are to each other. It resists the Hollywood instinct to add action, explain the mystery, or soften the darkness. The film trusts silence and stillness the way the original did, which is the last thing you expect from an American studio remake.

The changes Reeves makes are mostly contextual and intelligent. He relocates the story to early-eighties New Mexico, using Reagan-era religious anxiety as a quiet backdrop. He shifts a few emphases, making the boy’s isolation and the absent adults a little more central. None of it violates the original. It is a translation rather than a reinvention, and a careful translator’s respect runs through every choice.

Craft NoteReeves remade a beloved film by identifying what was essential and protecting it while changing only the contextual surface. The relationship, the ambiguity, the pace, the darkness all stayed. The setting and a few emphases moved. When you adapt or rework existing material, the discipline is in separating the essential from the incidental. What can change without damaging the thing, and what must be protected at all costs. A reworking that respects the core and freshens the surface honors the original. One that alters the core to seem original usually destroys what made the material worth reworking. Know which elements are load-bearing.

Two Remarkable Child Performances

The film rests entirely on its two young leads, and both are extraordinary. Kodi Smit-McPhee plays Owen as a fragile, watchful, deeply lonely boy, bullied at school and neglected at home, retreating into private cruelties and fantasies. He makes Owen’s isolation palpable, a child starved for any connection, which is exactly what makes him vulnerable to Abby.

Chloe Grace Moretz plays Abby, the vampire child, and the performance is a careful balance of tenderness and wrongness. She is genuinely warm with Owen, genuinely caring, and also genuinely a predator who has been twelve years old for a very long time and will outlive him as she has outlived others. Moretz holds both truths at once, the affectionate child and the ancient thing wearing a child’s face. The relationship between the two is the film, and the two actors make it ache.

For WritersMoretz plays Abby as simultaneously a caring child and an ancient predator, never resolving into one or the other, and the doubleness is what makes the character haunting. The affection is real. The danger is also real. When you write a character who must hold two contradictory truths, the performance and the prose have to keep both alive at every moment rather than alternating between them. Abby is not sometimes sweet and sometimes monstrous. She is both at once, always. The hardest and most rewarding characters refuse to collapse into a single reading. Hold the contradiction without resolving it.

The Uncomfortable Center

The film’s power comes from its willingness to sit in deeply uncomfortable territory. The relationship between Owen and Abby is tender and genuine, and it is also, when you examine it, troubling in ways the film refuses to look away from. Abby has likely had companions like Owen before, older men who served her as protectors and providers when they were boys and aged into servants. The film quietly suggests that Owen may be the next in a long line, that what looks like first love may be recruitment.

This ambiguity is the film’s most daring element. It presents a love story and then lets you wonder whether it is a love story at all or a portrait of predation and grooming dressed as romance. The film does not resolve the question. It lets the tenderness and the horror coexist, and the discomfort of not being able to separate them is the point. It is a film that trusts the audience to sit with moral unease rather than resolving it for them.

Atmosphere and Restraint

Reeves and his team create a world of wintry desolation, snow and concrete and the fluorescent gloom of a struggling apartment complex. The film is patient and quiet, building dread through stillness rather than shocks, though when the violence comes it is sudden and brutal. A car-crash sequence shot from inside the vehicle is a technical standout, and Abby’s feeding scenes are genuinely frightening precisely because they break the film’s calm so violently.

The restraint is the film’s defining quality. It refuses to hurry, refuses to explain, refuses to comfort. For viewers who want their horror loud and fast this will feel slow, but the slowness is the source of the film’s grip. It earns its frights and its heartbreak by making you wait for them, and the patience pays off in an ending that is both tender and quietly horrifying.

CompareLet Me In invites direct comparison with the Swedish original, Let the Right One In, and the comparison is the fairest way to judge it. The original is the slightly superior film, a touch stranger and more austere, with a snowbound Scandinavian atmosphere the remake cannot quite match. But Let Me In is no mere copy. It is a faithful, beautifully made companion piece that captures the original’s soul while standing on its own. Watch both. The remake earns its place beside the source rather than replacing it.

The Verdict

Let Me In earns its 8 as a rare remake that honors its source rather than exploiting it. Matt Reeves protects everything essential about the Swedish original, the central relationship, the ambiguity, the patience, the darkness, while making intelligent contextual changes. Two extraordinary child performances from Kodi Smit-McPhee and Chloe Grace Moretz carry a story that is tender and troubling at once, a love story that may be a portrait of predation. It loses a step to the slightly superior original and asks real patience of the viewer. A faithful, haunting, beautifully restrained film that proves remakes can be acts of respect.

FAQ

Is this a remake?
Yes, of the Swedish film Let the Right One In, made just two years earlier. It looked like Hollywood opportunism but turned out to be a careful, faithful remake that justifies its own existence by honoring the original while making smart contextual changes.

Is it as good as the original?
Very nearly. The Swedish original is slightly superior, a touch stranger and more austere, with an atmosphere the remake cannot fully match. But Let Me In is no mere copy. It captures the original’s soul and stands on its own as a companion piece worth seeing.

What is it about?
A bullied, lonely twelve-year-old boy befriends the strange child who moves in next door, a child who only comes out at night and needs blood to live. It is a vampire film, a coming-of-age story, and an unsettling love story between two children, one of them a predator.

Why is the central relationship uncomfortable?
Because the film suggests it may not be a love story at all. Abby has likely had boy companions before who aged into servants, and Owen may be the next. The film lets tenderness and predation coexist without resolving which it is, and that unease is deliberate.

Is it worth watching?
Yes. It is one of the few remakes that earns its existence, beautifully made and powerfully acted, with two remarkable child performances. It asks patience and sits in genuinely uncomfortable territory, but it rewards both. Watch it alongside the original rather than instead of it.