My wife usually works nights on Tuesdays and my daughter and I have developed a tradition of watching a movie together. She was in the mood for a scary movie and I have been wanting to watch Let the right one in, but she wasn’t interested in subtitles…twelve-year-olds. I’d also heard Let Me In was a good film having an 88% on Rotten Tomatoes so we rented it on Vudu and sat back to watch the movie.
Owen (Kodi Smit-McPhee) is a child in a broken home that is also a victim of bullying. He seems rather unhappy and lonely until a strange girl named Abby (Chloe Grace Moretz) and her father (Richard Jenkins) moves into the building that catches his attention. The two form a bond but Owen may be in over his head.
I’ve discussed Moretz before after seeing the lack-luster Fifth Wave, but she is a terrific actress. Her performance in this film reminded me of why I thought she was so fantastic. Her on screen presence is impressive and really adds to the story. The chemistry that Own and Abby have really makes this horror story feel more compelling than many others.
The cinematography is also very intriguing. I noticed early on that the Owen’s mother wasn’t being shown clearly. It is a continual element of the film that may be showing us how oblivious she is to Owen and what is going on in his life, or how distant she is to him because of the pending divorce. Either way, it helps build the story of the neglect Owen is suffering.
Dylan Minnette plays the lead bully, Kenny, in the trio of bullies. His performance feels like a traditional bully, but the story behind the bullying that is shown when his brother calls him “girl”, the same nickname that Kenny uses for Owen. It managed to garner enough sympathy from me to question how it would play out in the film.
The film has some gory scenes, but for the most part isn’t a traditional horror film. They don’t try to get you with jump scares, but the tone and atmosphere of the film have the feel of a great, dark story. I don’t want to give anything away about the story, but it is a familiar story with a really unique element.
Matt Reeves is the director of this film and he does a great job of establishing the question of what does evil look like. There are multiple sources that could be deemed as evil and the film plays with the traditional definition of what that is. Owen at one point asks his dad if evil is real. It’s an interesting theme in the movie that I think makes the story so compelling.
The worst element of the film has to be the CGI elements of the movie. That aside, I believe that Let Me In is a Must See Film. I definitely recommend that you check it out as long as you don’t mind a little blood.
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