IT IS well known the US market has little patience for films which are not in the English language and so it’s not a huge surprise that one of the best foreign films of last year, the meditative and clinical vampire movie Let The Right One In has been re-made less than a year after its release.
The story is largely the same. Owen is a 12-year-old boy who lives in New Mexico, a cultural wasteland with nothing but apartment complexes and forests for miles around.
Tormented and bullied at school he finds friendship in a new neighbour, Abby, who appears mysteriously barefoot in the snow, is oddly adept at solving Rubik’s cubes and has a taste for human blood.
While the Swedish film directed by Tomas Alfredson was a film about loneliness and friendship which just so happened to feature vampires, Let Me In is very much a vampire movie in the bone.
The elegiac pacing and quiet reflection of the Alfredson original has been disposed of and substituted with in your face horror.
Where Let The Right One In was a difficult movie to classify (was it really a horror movie at all?), Let Me In leaves absolutely no doubt as to its genre.
It’s stylistically completely different – Alfredson’s subtle visual cues (trickles of black blood against crisp white snow) have been replaced by fountaining gushers of spilt gore.
Let The Right One In was notable for its periods of silence which helped to underline the almost ethereal beauty of its set and compound its sense of isolation.
Let Me In by contrast is undermined by a score which features too many theatrical violin screeches and leaves nothing to the imagination.
It’s not only the horror elements that have been made more conspicuous – everything from Abby’s gender (which was originally markedly androgynous), to her relationship with her blood harvesting “father” are made much more explicit.
Sometimes this works to its advantage – a car crash shot entirely from the perspective of the back seat is a masterstroke and the opening shots of a man in hospital, his face horribly disfigured by acid, is all the more immediate.
But often, elements which made the original special – its subtlety and its restraint (implied rather than visualised violence) have been sieved away to leave a much more heavy-handed film.
While this might make it more accessible to a mainstream audience, in attempting to please the crowd Let Me In runs the risk of becoming lost in a tide of other conventional movies.
If anything, Let Me In is a fascinating case study of how the same story can be filmed in two contrasting ways.
Fans of the original expecting a simple transplant will be disappointed - Let Me In is tonally and stylistically a different film.
But all comparisons aside, it stands up in its own right as an engaging and well made horror movie.
However, it’s difficult not to feel that it’s simply an unnecessary remake of a film which wasn’t afraid to push boundaries.
Let Me In (15) is released on November 5.
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