This capsule was written as part of an abandoned project on Matt Reeves, a director whose work I've missed over the years. The goal of the project was to catch up with everything he'd made since Cloverfield, the most recent of his films that I'd seen, and write about them all in turn. Then, I'd watch The Batman and write about that one, too, in the hope of finding some kind of through-line that connected them all together. A potentially fruitful idea, I think, but one that I ultimately never finished for a number of uninteresting reasons. In the spirit of not letting this work go entirely to waste, I figured I’d publish the only completed capsule from the four that I planned. Maybe I’ll come back and finish this when Reeves makes another film.
Let Me In | Matt Reeves, 2010
Wounds that heal and wounds that don’t. Abby, a lonely young vampire, twelve years old for a long time, and her companion, Thomas, a mysterious man in his mid-sixties, move into the apartment next door to Owen, a meek young boy who lives with his devout mother and fantasises about stopping his bullies with a kitchen knife. A film about pain in all its forms, with this small, wintry New Mexico town trapped under a perpetual blanket of snow, both frozen and impermanent, providing a volatile backdrop for the violence that has endured within it for generations. The snow, of course, endures here, too, at least for a while, which I suppose is the point. It’s unnatural for things to remain the same, and yet Abby does. She relies on the violence of others to sustain her life, with her companion’s nights in the snow, face masked, knife in hand, plastic funnels and jugs in a duffel bag, the only thing keeping her from succumbing to a monstrous, inhuman hunger. His murders are an act of love, in a way, but a destructive one. That’s the crux of it all, I think, this contrast between acts of instinct and acts of rationality, and much like the snow, stuck between states of matter, there’s not always a distinction between the two. It’s never clear whether Abby actually loves Owen or is just grooming him to replace the ageing Thomas, nor is it clear whether Owen really knows just how much of himself he’s giving to Abby. There’s just more snow, more blood, more pain, and the innate desire to continue an unnatural life, whatever the cost.