Let me in
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | Let me in |
| Original title | Let me in |
| Country of production | USA , UK |
| original language | English |
| Publishing year | 2010 |
| length | 116 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 16 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Matt Reeves |
| script | Matt Reeves, John Ajvide Lindqvist |
| production |
Alexander Yves Brunner , Tobin Armbrust , Donna Gigliotti , John Nordling , Simon Oakes , Carl Molinder , Guy East |
| music | Michael Giacchino |
| camera | Greig Fraser |
| cut | Stan Salfas |
| occupation | |
| |
The film Let Me In is an American remake of the Swedish original Let the Right from the year 2008. The director took Matt Reeves . World premiere was on September 13, 2010 at the Toronto International Film Festival ; the theatrical release in Germany was over a year later on December 15, 2011. The film was shot in New Mexico .
action
prehistory
March 1983: An ambulance sped through the snow-covered streets in a police convoy. Inside the car, the doctors are fighting for the life of a man who has been severely burned to his face.
In the hospital, a police superintendent leads a monologue with the mysterious patient . A nurse informs him that in the entrance area of the hospital a little girl has asked about the patient. The inspector learns that the girl, who introduced herself as the man's daughter, has already left the hospital. A little later, the ward nurse realizes that the enigmatic patient has apparently managed to throw himself out of the window into his death. At the bedside the inspector finds the parting words "I'm sorry, Abby" ("Abby, I'm sorry"). Now follows a flashback that describes the past fourteen days.
action
Shy twelve-year-old Owen lives with his strictly religious and alcoholic mother on the top floor of an apartment building in Los Alamos , New Mexico . He suffers from the fact that his parents want a divorce . Owen isn't very popular in school either. Rather, he is the declared target of Kenny and his cronies, who mistreat or beat him every day. Instead of defending himself, the boy withdraws in the evening into his dream world, in which he mainly takes revenge on Kenny. Owen also likes to observe the neighborhood with his telescope .
One evening Owen watches as a girl of about the same age and an older man, whom he takes to be the child's father, move into the vacant apartment next door. He notices that the girl is walking barefoot through the snow despite the freezing temperatures in winter and is dressed for summer. In addition, the elderly gentleman is carrying a strange, large wooden box. Delighted by the new neighbors, Owen begins to eavesdrop on them both through the walls. The windows of the neighboring apartment are now darkened with old newspapers and blankets. The next evening, the man from the apartment next door kills a person by dragging him into a forest and bleeding into a plastic canister (although some of the blood is lost again through a fall). After the killer returns to his apartment, Owen overhears a heated argument through the wall. A male voice, which obviously belongs to the older gentleman, is dominated by a threatening and eerily distorted voice that Owen cannot assign.
The next evening, Owen meets the girl in the playground , who introduces herself as Abby. During the conversation that followed, Abby mentions some strange things. She describes her age as “more or less twelve years”. And when Owen asks her about her bare feet, she replies that she actually never freezes. Abby seems uncomfortable with Owen's interest and is very direct that they cannot be friends. When Owen's question about why, she leaves him with the words "Because that's the way it is." Nevertheless, there are further encounters between the two almost every evening; Owen is soon more than fascinated by the strange girl. The following evening, Abby kills the jogger from the house across the street near the playground and drinks his blood. When she comes home, Owen overhears another argument between her and her supposed father, who then leaves the house cursing and then takes care of the removal of the corpse that Abby had left behind.
Owen is beaten up at school by Kenny and injured in the cheek. When he sees Abby again, she speaks to him about his injury and Owen confesses to being beaten up regularly. The girl tells him to fight back, and if that doesn't help, she'll help him. When he expresses doubts, she tells him that she is much stronger than he thinks. That same evening they begin to communicate through the wall in Morse code . During a walk through the wintry town, Abby asks Owen if he would like her and if she would be friends with her if she wasn't a girl at all. Despite his astonishment at these questions, he answered in the affirmative. The friendship between the two is strengthened and on the way home Owen asks Abby.
When Abby comes back to her apartment, the elderly man packs his backpack to go on the hunt again. Before leaving, he urges Abby not to see Owen again. His subsequent attempt to bring a person into his power fails and he is involved in a serious accident. In order to remain undetected, he then showered himself with acid and was taken to a hospital. Meanwhile, Abby is listening to the report of an accident on the radio at home, perks up when an acid is mentioned, and goes to the hospital. Once there, she pretends to be the daughter of the seriously injured man and finds out at reception which floor her supposed father is on. Then she leaves the hospital to climb the facade. She sees the man through the window and makes herself noticeable by knocking. He gets out of bed and opens the window. Abby asks him to invite her in, but the acid damage prevents him from speaking. So he offers the girl his blood. Abby bites his neck and drinks from him. Thereupon he plunges himself into the depths and dies.
Abby returns home and seeks consolation from Owen by allowing him to invite her in through his bedroom window. Half asleep he allows her to enter the room and she lies down in bed with him after asking him not to turn to face her, as blood is still visible around her mouth. To Owen's sleepy question how she got to his nursery window from the outside, Abby replies that she flew. The next morning Owen finds a puzzling message from her in which she quotes a slightly modified quote from Romeo and Juliet : "To stay means to die, but to leave." However, Owen does not understand the true meaning of these words. At school, Owen fends off an attack by Kenny and his friends for the first time, who want to throw him into a waterhole during the school's ice skating excursion (during which the jogger's body frozen in the ice is discovered) by beating Kenny with an iron rod and seriously injured in the ear. Owen then receives a temporary expulsion from school. In the evening he proudly reports to Abby about the events and offers her a blood brotherhood . Without warning, he cuts his thumb with his pocket knife. To his horror, Abby falls on her knees and licks his blood from the floor. When she looks up again, her eyes shine like those of a predator . To resist the urge to bite Owen, she storms through the basement into the courtyard and instead attacks Svenja, the neighbor from the house opposite. But before Abby can kill the young woman, she is distracted by her friend Larry and runs away.
Owen is horrified when he realizes Abby's true nature. After he calmed down, he visits Abby at her apartment to find out if she is a vampire . Abby admits that she needs blood to live and that she was twelve years old for a long time. Owen also learns that her (deceased) companion is not her father, but a former friend of hers. She shows Owen old photographs in which he recognizes the man as a child next to Abby. Startled, Owen wants to leave the apartment immediately, but Abby blocks his way. Only when he asks her fearfully if she would do something to him, too, does she give way.
In the hospital, neighbor Larry reports the events to the police and draws their attention to Abby, whom he has recognized as Svenja's attacker. Meanwhile Svenja wakes up; she has become a vampire. When the nurse opens the curtains in the room and a ray of sun catches Svenja, she is on fire in no time. The nurse who rushes to her aid also catches fire and both die a painful death.
A little later, Abby knocks on Owen's door. When the boy opens, she asks him to let her in. But Owen now refuses to offer a personal invitation and demands that the girl enter the apartment like this. But in the middle of the living room, Abby has a seizure and begins to bleed profusely all over her body. Owen now gives the invitation out of concern for her and then asks her if she could have died. Abby admits that she was hoping he wouldn't let this happen. When Owen's mother returns, Abby flees back to her apartment unnoticed. While his mother sleeps, Owen sneaks up to Abby in the middle of the night.
Late in the morning Owen woke up on the floor of Abby's nursery where he had stayed. He finds another message from Abby stating that she is in the bathroom and that he should stay away from it. But a little later the inspector (who was investigating in the hospital at the beginning of the film and who had already stood in front of the apartment once before, but was not let in by Abby) appears again in front of the apartment door and finally gains entry by force. Owen successfully hides from the police officer, who finds Abby's message and discovers the girl in the bathtub under several blankets. As he loosens a corner of the covered window, Abby hits a beam of light and she wakes up. The girl falls at the police in a furious rage. In his agony, the policeman asks Owen for help. But he silently closes the door. After killing the policeman, Abby has to hurry out of town and says goodbye to Owen with a kiss. In the evening he watches from his window as she gets into a taxi with a few belongings and drives away.
Later that evening, Owen and his class are in the school swimming pool. Through a trick, Kenny and his cronies manage to ambush Owen unhindered in order to get revenge for Kenny's injury. His older brother Jimmy has now taken control of the gang and threatens Owen with his own pocket knife: If he manages to stay underwater for three minutes, Jimmy will only cut his cheek open; but if he showed up earlier, he would gouge his eye out. Jimmy puts Owen's head under the water for several minutes and even Kenny gets scary. He implores his brother to let go of Owen, but Owen refuses. Owen is about to drown when he hears the shattering of a window glass and horrific screams. Slowly the water around him begins to turn red and a torn head drifts past the boy. Owen realizes that Abby has appeared: she kept her promise and killed Jimmy, Kenny and the others. Owen emerges from the water, breathing heavily, and Abby, covered in blood, helps him out of the pool.
The next morning Owen leaves the city by train. While checking the tickets, the conductor is amazed at the large box that Owen has with him. After he has left the compartment again, there is a soft knock from the box, which Owen replies with a smile.
Reviews
“… The director stuck to the Swedish original with respect. There are settings that work like 1: 1 adopted. Only a few nice action sequences have been added ... "
"Sensitive remake of a Swedish film that suggestively implements its painful material about youthful isolation, bullying, outsiderhood and first love by borrowing from the horror genre and impresses with both its atmospheric imagery and remarkable youthful actors."
"A loving homage as well as an independent film [...] Reeves has created a visually and content-wise beguiling drama that is unconditionally recommended not only to genre fans."
"The best American horror film in the last 20 years."
Awards
The production has received several nominations and awards, especially at national US film festivals. In contrast, the film hardly won any international awards.
| price | category | Award / nomination | result |
|---|---|---|---|
| Austin Film Critics Association Awards | Breakthrough Artist | Chloë Grace Moretz | Won |
| Central Ohio Film Critics Association Awards | Actor of the Year | Chloë Grace Moretz | Nominated |
| Breakthrough Film Artist | Chloë Grace Moretz | Won | |
| Best Overlooked Film | Let me in | Nominated | |
| Empire Awards | Best newcomer | Chloë Grace Moretz | Won |
| Best horror | Let me in | Nominated | |
| Golden Tomato Awards | Best horror | Let me in | Won |
| Best wide release | Let me in | Nominated | |
| National Board of Review of Motion Pictures Awards | Top independent films | Let me in | Won |
| Richard Attenborough Film Awards | Rising Star | Chloë Grace Moretz | Won |
| Saturn Awards | Best horror film | Let me in | Won |
| Best Performance by a Younger Actor | Kodi Smit-McPhee | Nominated | |
| Chloë Grace Moretz | Won | ||
| Best Director | Matt Reeves | Nominated | |
| Best writing | Matt Reeves | Nominated | |
| Best music | Michael Giacchino | Nominated | |
| Best makeup | Let me in | Nominated | |
| Scream Awards | Best horror movie | Let me in | Won |
| Best horror actress | Chloë Grace Moretz | Won |
Additional scenes on the DVD
The released purchase DVD also contains some scenes that were not used in the film.
- For example, when Abby fled Owen's apartment and thoughtfully played with her memorabilia in her child's room.
- Another unpublished scene is Owens talking to his PE teacher when he specifically asks him about the bullying by Kenny and his friends.
- In another scene, Abby Owen reveals her own centuries-old suffering in his kitchen and lets him share her memories. For example, Owen experiences how Abby was attacked by a vampire in her child's room in the Middle Ages and made undead.
Web links
- Let Me In in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Let Me In atrotten tomatoes(English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Release certificate for Let Me In . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry , November 2011 (PDF; test number: 130 271 K).
- ↑ Let me in. Der Spiegel, accessed February 6, 2015 .
- ↑ Let Me In. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .
- ↑ filmstarts.de
- ↑ "Let Me In": True love knows no age. n-tv.de, accessed on February 6, 2015 .
- ↑ Award (IMDB) (English). IMDB, accessed February 6, 2015 .
- ↑ 2010 Awards . Austin Film Critics Association . December 22, 2010. Archived from the original on February 20, 2011. Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved April 1, 2011.
- ^ Central Ohio Film Critics Association Awards Nominees . In: AwardsDaily . January 3, 2011. Retrieved April 1, 2011.
- ↑ AWARDS: 2010 . Central Ohio Film Critics Association. January 6, 2011. Retrieved April 1, 2011.
- ↑ In Full: Empire Awards 2011 nominees . DigitalSpy. February 24, 2011. Retrieved April 1, 2011.
- ^ Top Independent Films . National Board of Review of Motion Pictures . Archived from the original on January 8, 2007. Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved April 3, 2011.
- ^ Film Awards Winners . filmoftheyear.co.uk. Archived from the original on April 30, 2011. Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved April 1, 2011.
- ↑ Saturn Awards 2011 - Movie Winners in full - Movies News - Digital Spy . Digitalspy approx. June 24, 2011. Retrieved January 3, 2012.
