If 12-year-old Owen in the sweetly horrific vampire movie "Let Me In" could travel forward through time three decades to 2011 and meet his own self at 42, what would he say? "Let Me In" is set in the early 1980s, when Ronald Reagan was U.S. President, Russia was the Soviet Union and the Western world lived in fear of communism or nuclear annihilation, whichever came first.
Owen (played by the excellent, other-worldly Kodi Smit-McPhee of "The Road") is in the sixth grade, living in New Mexico in a drab suburban apartment complex with his divorced, preoccupied mom. Bullied in school for being introverted and "different," Owen's best friends are a little transistor radio and a Rubik's Cube. Too young to cruise the mall, too old for childish games in the playground and a quarter of a century too early to lose himself in Facebook updates, Owen — without being aware of it — leads a dense existence mired in intense, untranslatable thoughts and sensations.
To say that Owen is lonely would be a gross understatement, but to describe him as unhappy would be to cheapen him. Thirty years down the line, he could be a suited businessman saddled with car payments and a hefty mortgage, checking Twitter as he crunches miles on the running machine at his local gym. In 1983, however, Owen is beautifully and delicately suspended in an ethereal world of misery and innocence.