Let Me In – review

A very good film, slightly overpraised, has been remade as a slightly good film, very overpraised. Tomas Alfredson's cult Swedish romance Let the Right One In from 2008, about a bullied boy who falls in love with the undead tweenage girl next door, has been repackaged as a Hollywood indie directed by Matt Reeves, marketed at an audience who are keen to get a load of the hip new vampire scene, but obviously turn their discerning noses up at the Twilight franchise. In marketing terms, this remake is very much like those Harry Potter paperbacks with the special "adult" cover-designs or Daniel Barenboim laying on a special orchestral arrangement of a My Chemical Romance album at the Royal Festival Hall.

And it isn't bad, though I'm a bit baffled by the saucer-eyed reviews it's been getting. The original title, with its Morrissey reference, has been slimmed down to the punchier Let Me In – a reference to the fact that the vampire must, allegedly, be invited into the home of his or her victim. (Like the original, Let Me In has a hint of Abel Ferrara's vampire film The Addiction.) The setting, originally 1980s suburban Stockholm, has now been shifted to Los Alamos in the same era, perhaps hinting at a quasi-Godzilla imagery of nuclear mutation in vampirism; Ronald Reagan is glimpsed on TV, descanting on the nature of "evil".

Kodi Smit-McPhee plays Owen, who's being brutally picked on at school; lonely and miserable, he finds friendship with the new girl neighbour: Abby, a vampire played by Chloe Moretz – who was a thousand times scarier and more interesting while playing a similar role in Matthew Vaughan's Kick-Ass. Abby lives with an old man who appears to be her dad, played by Richard Jenkins. It is his job to kill people and drain them of blood to keep Abby fed. When the "Father" calamitously bungles this, Abby has to go out and slake her thirst in the traditional manner.

Let Me In is pretty faithful to the first movie, but unfortunately omits the local "sleazy drunk" community that gave it a lot of its satirical flavour and for some reason misses a central twist-reveal moment in the scene in which Owen ferociously turns the tables on his tormentors while skating on a frozen pond. For me, the uncomfortable thing about Let Me In is that it amplified my reservation about the original: the vampire scariness was always in danger of being upstaged by the real-world scariness of bullying. If you've never seen Let the Right One In, this is fine. But why not just stick on the DVD of the original? And if you must, select English dubbing from the languages menu.