Let Me In

I saw Let Me In recently. As Vampire flicks go, it’s one of the best of the genre. A twisted love story.

Owen is an adolescent boy whose parents are separated. Indeed, going through a divorce. He’s staying with his mom in a slummy apartment complex.

He’s very bright, but small and vulnerable. He’s one of those kids who has a “pick-on-me” bull’s-eye painted on his back. He attends a vicious inner city school where he’s bullied by some older, bigger students. His loneliness is accentuated by fact that his world is walled in by ice and snowdrifts.

His mom seems to be a genuinely caring, conscientious parent. But she’s distracted by divorce proceedings and working a job to support herself and her son as a single parent. And she’s naïve about what he’s facing at school every day.

His mom is a professing Christian. The film doesn’t mock her piety, unlike the mother in Carrie. She’s not a fanatic or a hypocrite.

Her piety may be conventional rather than deep, but it gives Owen a moral framework. It makes him morally conflicted about his new “girlfriend.”

Owen needs his father, but his father isn’t there. Moreover, his dad is a poor listener. The father is too mad at the mother to tune into his son’s concerns. He misses a key opportunity to make the difference.

Enter Abby. She’s a girl, but not a girl. She was turned at the age of 12, so she’s a paradox. Because her maturation was frozen in time at the age of 12, she still has the emotional make-up of an adolescent girl.

But she’s been 13 for decades, if not longer. So in another sense, she’s very mature for her age. Worldly. Sophisticated. Not to mention the awkward little fact that she’s a (literally) bloodthirsty serial killer.

She’s constantly on the move to elude the authorities. Like Owen, she’s adrift. If he’s lonely, so is she.

Mysterious and pretty, she takes an interest in Owen. Naturally he forms an instant crush. But she can oscillate between sweetness and savagery in the blink of an eye.

Because, psychologically, she’s still an adolescent girl, the puppy love goes both ways. If Owen is smitten by Abby, she has a boy crazy streak which reciprocates his passion.

But there’s a rival in the picture. Her “father,” who isn’t really her father. Thomas is jealous of Owen because Thomas was Owen. Thomas is getting over the hill. So the cycle repeats itself. He’s on the way out, while the new kid is on the way in.

Abby is protective of Owen, which is one reason he falls for her. But it’s not purely disinterested on her part. They will end up protecting each other in different ways. She will use him and cast him aside when he becomes a liability. Although she has real feelings for him, survival takes precedence. He’s not the first, and he won’t be the last.

Unlike the Twilight saga (of which I only saw the first installment), this film doesn’t glamorize vampirism. It’s a very dark romance. A jarring mix of beauty and brutality.