Let the Wrong One In (Movie Review)

Screened as a part of the 2021 Fantastic Fest.

First, start with a classic horror movie from the past and switch up the title to a Mad Magazine style parody. Then slap that title on a horror-comedy from the British Isles doing a piss take on a classic movie monster, starring an actor from a beloved cult hit tv show. In a best case scenario, you’ll end up with Shaun of the Dead and you’ve got yourself a new initiate to the pantheon of horror-comedy. Let the Wrong One In, however, shows that combining all of those elements doesn’t always lead to a surefire success.

After a fun opening scene in Transylvania in which a loutish inflatable-penis-toting bachelorette party runs afoul of a vampire, the movie settles in with two brothers, Matt (Karl Rice) and Deco (Eoin Duffy). Matt is a good boy who cooks his mum breakfast every morning and tries to not follow his estranged older brother down the path of addiction and irresponsibility. When Deco shows up one morning looking like shit and unable to tolerate the bright sunlight, Matt assumes it’s just another hangover, but it turns out that Deco has bigger problems, most likely related to the random bird he made out with in the club toilet the night before...the one who also bit him on the neck and drained him of blood. Matt calls a doctor (apparently Irish doctors still make house calls?) and the doctor who shows up (Anthony Stuart Head of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fame) seems far more interested in killing vampires than adhering to the Hippocratic Oath.

Let the Wrong One In is sitcom-ish both in setup and execution, to the point where it feels like the kind of imported regional tv series you’d randomly come across while browsing Netflix, watch an episode or two, and then immediately forget about. Its goofy and irreverent take on vampires feels a bit late to the party coming ten years after the onslaught of vampire parodies unleashed by the success of Twilight, not to mention a movie and multiple seasons of What We Do In the Shadows.

It also suffers by foregrounding the two brothers who prove to be its least compelling characters, while sidelining the much more entertaining hen party turned vampire coven. The movie livens up every time the focus switches to them, which makes it a drag when we’re forced to go back to spending time with our main characters. It probably also bears mentioning that viewers who love an Irish accent as thick as a slice of soda bread will get a kick out of this, but anyone not intimately familiar with the blarniest of Irish accents will most likely find themselves reaching for the closed captions, lest they feel like they’re watching an unsubtitled movie in a language they haven’t studied since high school. That’s probably the most generous way to approach Let the Wrong One In – as a moderately charming regional B-movie best enjoyed by those who fall in the narrow Venn Diagram overlap of loving both sophomoric vampire humor and Ireland.