Let The Wrong One In

2023 - 1 - 20

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Image courtesy of "Irish Examiner"

Film review: It's all good, blood-drenched fun in Let the Wrong One In (Irish Examiner)

Written and directed by Conor McMahon (Dead Meat, Stitches), Let the Wrong One In is a comedy-horror.

Let the Wrong One In (16s) stars Karl Rice as Matt, an average Dublin lad whose life is upended when he realises that his brother Deco (Eoin Duffy) is a vampire. McMahon has fun with the classic vampire tropes — Deco is a drug addict, so Matt simply assumes his ghastly pallor and terror of daylight are the typical junkie symptoms — and there’s the added bonus of Anthony Head reprising his role as vampire-hunter mentor from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, while the idea that Dublin’s taxi drivers are a kind of anti-vampire community watch is a nice touch. Written and directed by Conor McMahon ( Dead Meat, Stitches), Let the Wrong One In is a comedy-horror that nails its colours to the mast with a Hammer Horror-style intro in which Sheila, out on the lash in Transylvania on her hen night, goes looking for a little extra-curricular romance and ends up biting off more than she can chew, so to speak.

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Image courtesy of "Movies.ie - Irish Cinema Site"

Let The Wrong One In - Movie Review • Movies.ie - Irish Cinema Site (Movies.ie - Irish Cinema Site)

The Verdict: Let The Wrong One In, a cheekily-titled spin on a well-regarded horror film, sees Conor McMahon return to feature directing for the first time in ...

Unusually, he chose to set most of the film during daylight though he missed a chance to make a joke about the cloudy Irish weather not affecting vampires that much. It’s also a Dublin film through and through, from the enthusiastic cast to the accents to the humour and a bizarre, has-to-be-seen-to-be-believed ending that makes the Dublin skyline look very different for a while at least. It would be fair to say walking in blind to this film would be inadvisable, as it’s made with a specific audience in mind. It’s those little moments which make the film stand out rather than the larger, over-the-top sequences that bludgeon you to death. That makes it tonally uneven to the point where it almost seems deliberate on McMahon’s part. The Plot: Deco (Eoin Duffy) gets a vampire’s kiss from Sheila (Mary Murray) at a party.

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Image courtesy of "RTE.ie"

Deadly! Conor McMahon's 5 best horror-comedies (RTE.ie)

Conor McMahon, the writer and director of new Irish horror comedy, Let The Wrong One In, picks five of his favourite films that aren't afraid to be scary ...

But it's the chemistry between the two leads, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, that makes this more than a stylistic exercise. Then when the Gremlins first appear a lot of green light is introduced and the first thing the gremlins do is go to an Irish pub and get drunk. Whenever I’m on a hike or walk I’m always compelled to say - "Stick to the road, stay off the moors." When I first saw this film at the age of 15, I was left stunned. [Manage Preferences](javascript:void(0);) Please review their details and accept them to load the content.

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