Review #188: Let Me In (2010)

This review was originally written in 2022.

Gabe's 100 Bucket List Horror Films Review #43: Let Me In (2010)

I can't fathom why both this movie AND Let the Right One In were on this bucket list, considering this one is basically a shot-for-shot remake of that one. But whatever, they're both on the list so I'm reviewing them both.

To recap in basically a word-for-word manner, Let Me In is an American film about a young boy, Owen, bullied at school and without many peers, who befriends a girl, Abby, who recently moved into his apartment complex and who tries to teach Owen to stand up for himself. Little does Owen know, Abby is actually a vampire and her bloodlust will soon cause problems- problems that have kept her on the run for many, many years.

Most of my thoughts on the other movie apply to this one. It's honestly such a close adaptation, I'm kind of impressed- I saw both of these films maybe ten years ago (I saw the American one first), and I remembered there being more differences, with my past opinion skewing more in favor of the Swedish original, but after watching them both back-to-back, the differences are incredibly slight and I can't really say one is better than the other. They're that close. The other version has a bit more of a (for lack of a better term) foreign mystique to it, since I don't know what life in Sweden is like so for all I know any minor discrepancies between the movie and real life can be papered over with "Hey, maybe that's just what Swedish people do", and so the American version might feel a bit more hokey and contrived because I know what Americans do, but ultimately they're both telling the same story in basically the exact same way.

One noteworthy difference is the near-complete omission of the subplot involving the people around the apartment complex; in Let the Right One In, Eli kills one of her neighbors in a moment of desperate hunger, and this leads several of the other neighbors to get involved with trying to find the killer. Near the end of the film, it's one of these neighbors who finds out Eli is behind it, and who gets into her apartment to confront her (though that doesn't work out well for him). In the American version, however, they've instead added this very slight throughline involving a detective who is following the case, and it's him who ends up at Abby's apartment in the same manner. But then they also decided to use this subplot as sort of a framing device (?), by starting the film in medias res after Abby's "father" has been arrested, then flashing backward to the beginning of the story. It wasn't necessary but doesn't impact the film one way or another.

Oh- one thing that actually did bother me about this one compared to the Swedish version: In the Swedish version, Oskar's bully is constantly calling him "piggy" as a general insult. As a result, Oskar uses the word "piggy" when he himself is fantasizing about bullying others (and Eli uses the word to get a rise out of Oskar as well). In the American version, however, they opted to replace "piggy" with insults that feminize Owen, calling him a "girl" instead. While I don't think the filmmakers are actually saying they think that being feminine is itself an insult- clearly the insults are coming from the villain of the film, so we're supposed to see it as a thing bad people do- but at the same time, they already had a source material that had an applicable insult, and they decided it would be more appropriate for their audience to have the main characters using heteronormative sexuality as the basis for their insults. And that bothered me. Was that really a necessary change? Did they think Americans would rather see a movie where the bullies used toxic masculinity to oppress others, in a way that couldn't have been achieved in any other way? I don't know. But like I said, it bothered me.

So both movies are good, but if you've never seen either, I would recommend watching the Swedish version over the American. Except the American version has a scene involving arcade games and Now & Laters (two of my favorite things) so I'm conflicted.

Overall Rating: 6/10 Bullies Really Interested in Morse Code

A Request for Anyone Writing Fiction: If you ever need a person to draw blood in order to engage in a blood pact with another person, STOP HAVING THEM CUT THEIR PALM. Cutting your palm is the WORST place to cut. You can get blood from literally anywhere in your body, and your palm is going to take longer to heal than basically anywhere else and you're going to be in CONSTANT PAIN until it heals. Oskar/Owen even point out to Eli/Abby that "You can just prick your finger" YEAH I'LL BET YOU CAN, MAYBE YOU SHOULD HAVE DONE THAT TOO OSKAR/OWEN