Let Me In

Writer-director Matt Reeves transplants John Ajvide Lindqvist’s novel Let the Right One In (and the 2008 Swedish movie made from it) to Los Alamos, New Mexico, in 1983, but otherwise most of the story and characters—and all of the creepy, unsettling mood—remain intact, as a withdrawn, bullied boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee) is befriended by a mysterious girl (Chloë Grace Moretz) who happens to be a vampire. Like the Swedish cult hit, it’s a horror movie that risks becoming boring (and, frankly, sometimes does), but the lack of expensive effects and cheap scares only serves to underline the horror. Richard Jenkins plays the girl’s “guardian” with a haunted grimace, and the added suggestion that they’ve been together since they were (seemingly) the same age gives a grisly hint of what this new boy has in store.