Let Me In

Review

The poetic Swedish vampire picture (with arterial spray) Let the Right One In has been hauntingly well transplanted to the high desert of Los Alamos, New Mexico, and renamed Let Me In. The tale of a scrawny 12-year-old outcast (Kodi Smit-McPhee) who drifts into an indelible relationship with a girl (Chloë Grace Moretz) in a cloak who doesn’t come out in the day, it’s bathed in a pale orange winter light that gives the barren landscape an unearthly glow. Michael Giacchino’s score is full of shivers and plinks, ghostly chorales and shuddering strings: It’s the most suggestive music for a horror film in years. Director Matt Reeves misses only one aspect of the original. The Swedish girl is androgynous, adding resonance to the theme of forbidden love, whereas Moretz is positively sultry: heavy-�lidded, hollow-eyed, with fashion-model cheekbones. She’s quite a vision of death, though. Ingmar Bergman would have followed her anywhere. — David Edelstein