Let the Wrong One In (2021) poster

Let the Wrong One In (2021)

Rating:


Ireland. 2021.

Crew

Director/Screenplay – Conor McMahon, Producers – Trisha Flood, Julianne Ford, Michael Lavelle & Ruth Treacy, Photography – Michael Lavelle, Music – Liam Bates, Special Effects – Film FX Ireland (Supervisor – Brendan Byrne), Production Design – Mark Kilbride. Production Company – Workshed Films Ltd/Tailored Films Ltd/The Broadcasting Authority of Ireland/RTE.

Cast

Karl Rice (Matt), Eoin Duffy (Deco), Anthony Head (Henry Montgomery), David Pearse (Frank), Lisa Haskins (Natalie), Hilda Fay (Ma), Mary Murray (Sheila)


Plot

Matt has been told by his mother not to let his drunken, screw-up of a brother Deco into the house. Matt ignores this only to find Deco in a bad state after being attacked and bitten by a girl in a nightclub bathroom. After Deco’s skin starts to burn in the sunlight, Matt realises Deco has been bitten by a vampire. They call a doctor to help but the person who arrives proves to be the vampire hunting taxi driver Henry. Henry explains that his girlfriend Sheila was turned into a vampire while on a trip to Transylvania. She is now busy creating an army of vampires in the streets of Dublin. While fighting off Sheila and her vampire army, they try to prevent Deco from drinking his first taste of blood in some hope of saving him.


Irish director Conor McMahon has become a genre regular over the years with the likes of Dead Meat (2004), The Disturbed (2009), Stitches (2012) and From the Dark (2014).

There have been assorted vampire comedies for more than four decades with the likes of The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967), Love at First Bite (1979), Once Bitten (1985), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992), Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995) and the more recent likes of What We Do in the Shadows (2014) and Hawk and Rex: Vampire Slayers (2020), among a good many others. For a more detailed overview of the genre see Vampire Films. The title spoofs the acclaimed Swedish vampire film Let the Right One In (2008). Another homage comes in the presence of Anthony Head from tv’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003), the film’s only recognisable name, as the vampire hunting taxi driver.

Conor McMahon doesn’t reinvent the wheel but makes an enjoyable vampire comedy. The basic concept is the vampire comedy married with the Irish drinking subculture. In the opening moments, as Eoin Duffy stumbles through the streets, the film makes amusing play between the symptoms of vampirism and waking up with a hangover after a hard night’s drinking (in the course of which he ended up making out with a girl in a nightclub bathroom stall, thinking her biting his neck was just her getting freaky). Later we get a vampiric hen party stalking the streets.

(l to r) The vampire Deco (Eoin Duffy) and his brother Matt (Karl Rice)

The central character of Deco (Eoin Dufy) has an appealing idiocy. The film keeps playing upon this in a way that eventually starts to work. His response to being given the vampire bite is “I’ll have to lay low for awhile and hope it clears up. Like when I had herpes.” Equally, Deco’s girlfriend (Lisa Haskins) has to be told “No, you’re immortal, not “I’m a model”.” In the perfectly appealing climax, Karl Rice, who has been eating garlic chips, manages to drive the queen vampire away by giving a large burp.

I thought that this was the best of Conor McMahon’s films to date. His other works have left me feeling they were not particularly imaginatively warmed over genre themes. With Let the Wrong One In however, McMahon tries out comedy and surprisingly enough succeeds. He and his cast play loose and easy and end up hitting the mark most of the time. It’s a film that is far more likeable than it deserves to be.

We had had another venture into the Irish vampire film eighteen months before this with Boys from County Hell (2020), which played things more seriously but also showed the vampire film adapting itself to aspects of Irish society – rural there, urban Dublin here. The drawback of both films is that the actors are frequently talking with accents so thick and so vested in local colloquialism that they need subtitles to be understood by the rest of the world – vampires comes out pronounced as “vampoires,” for instance.


Trailer here


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