HOLLYWOOD’S relentless crusade to remake the cream of foreign language cinema for the benefit of the illiterate or just plain lazy American masses, who can’t or simply won’t read subtitles, continues in earnest with Let Me In.
Based on Tomas Alfredson's chilling Let The Right One In and John Ajvide Lindqvist’s novel of the same name, Cloverfield director Matt Reeves’ film stays doggedly faithful to the original Swedish movie, which was rightly showered with plaudits when it was released in the UK two years ago.
Small town Los Alamos, New Mexico, replaces icy Sweden as the film’s setting, but apart from a few minor tweaks, the story remains unchanged.
Shy 12-year old Owen (Kodi Smit-McPhee) is a loner, suffering daily at the hands of his bullying classmates.
His isolation is interrupted when the enigmatic, bare-footed Abby (Chloe Grace Moretz) moves in next door with a mysterious guardian.
But while the pair form a close bond, it soon becomes clear Owen’s new best friend is, in fact, a blood-sucking vampire who is forcing her reluctant but adoring older consort to go out and brutally murder yokels for their sticky red stuff.
As the bodies pile up, it’s not long before the finger of suspicion points to Abby and Owen’s friendship is pushed to the limits.
Reeves has laboriously remade the original film almost frame by frame, even down to Owen’s nerdy bowl cut, and surprisingly resists the temptation to eschew the first movie’s slow building dread with fast-paced shocks.
However, by failing to add anything new to an already brilliant horror, Reeves’s revamp feels little more than a cynical attempt to cash in at the box office by appealing to a wider English-speaking audience.
While Smit-McPhee and Moretz are outstanding as the child leads, Let Me In offers very little for fans of the original.
In reality, this is nothing more than a technically excellent rip-off of a spine-tingling masterpiece.
They say imitation is a the highest form of flattery, but in this case is it more a depressing indication of Hollywood’s increasingly depleted well of original ideas?
Let Me In (15) premiered at the London Film Festival and is released nationwide on November 5. For more information on the festival, visit bfi.org.uk/lff
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