Acts of Love: notes on Let the Right One In and The Devil’s Hour

A psychological horror story and a paranormal procedural; both with a lot to say about parents and children — and hard choices. One is great, the other is darn good; both are worth a watch.

Let the Right One In is based on a best-selling Swedish novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist. It’s been adapted into a Swedish film, an American film by Matt Reeves, and even a stage production. So this new Showtime series comes with a lot of baggage — and has a lot to live up to — but what I watched on the screen over the last ten weeks was damn near perfect. It didn’t leave me with a desire to check out the source material; I couldn't imagine what I'd gain. I didn’t want to dilute or interfere with the memory of what I’d just seen. This new Let the Right One In doesn’t shy away from the harsher aspects of the story, but the predominant mood is euphoric: the kind of high that comes with confident storytelling and a cast that’s clearly luxuriating in it. Creator Andrew Hinderaker knows exactly how he wants to reimagine Lindqvist's story across 10 weeks — and all the themes he hopes to explore that the episodic format permits — and he makes the most of it.

In case you don’t know the basic setup, Let the Right One In — in all its incarnations — focuses on a lonely boy who befriends a girl who turns out to be a vampire. It’s vampirism as a metaphor for the pangs of adolescence. Hinderaker retains the premise, but flips it. He turns it into the story of a father, Mark Kane, whose daughter was infected with a virus that turned her into a vampire, and who’s spent the last decade searching for a cure. He’s followed the latest set of leads back to New York City — where he once lived with his wife and daughter and flourished as a chef. He takes up residence in a low-rent high-rise, where his next-door neighbor turns out to be a cop working the very case that caught his attention: a killer who’s shredding his victims, who Mark believes might be a vampire. The father and the cop are investigating the same case from different angles — all while living down the hall from each other. And their kids — vampire Eleanor (Ellie for short) and 12-year-old Isaiah, a sweet nerd who’s an easy target for bullies — become fast friends.

Hinderaker doesn’t tiptoe around the coincidences. He presents them as part of the premise, then plunges you right into the action. Mark isn’t merely consumed with searching for the vampire who turned his daughter. He needs money to support the two of them, which he finds when his friend and former business partner agrees to hire him as a sous chef at his old restaurant. Doing something that gives him pleasure helps keep him sane while he’s procuring Ellie the human blood she needs to survive. Mark has gotten good at hunting down lowlifes whose actions are so despicable that he, a devout Catholic, can justify killing them. But a decade of slaughter — with so little to show for it — is eating away at him. He goes to a confessional where a priest (who sees Ellie as an abomination) tells him that God will forgive him only if he stops. And Mark is thirsting for absolution, but he can’t desert his daughter. He has no proof to back up his home-grown theories — that finding the vampire who sired her will yield a cure — but it’s all he has. He can’t let go.

As Mark, Demián Bichir is devastating. His features betray a decade of torment; his face seem hollowed out by guilt and shame. The turmoil that consumes him speaks to the question at the heart of Let the Right One In: not “what would you do to protect your child,” but what wouldn’t you do? The series goes beyond wondering about the sacrifices we’d make for family; it wonders about the atrocities. What turns people into killers — how easy is it to justify murder to save someone you love? Is it instinctual? Is it genetic? Or is a process so dehumanizing that you lose a part of your soul? Let the Right One In bills itself as a “psychological horror drama,” and that’s just about right. It’s about the literal sacrifices parents make for their children.

But there’s another side to Let the Right One In that’s just as crucial to its tone. If Bichir radiates torment, Anika Noni Rose — as Naomi Cole, the cop next door — radiates warmth. She’s a blessed relief from the hardened female detectives we’re used to seeing on the small screen; Rose decides to lead with her heart. That doesn’t mean she’s not good at her job — on the contrary, she excels at it — but it’s her devotion to her son that defines her. It’s Rose who permits the series to take the occasional detour onto a more domestic route; at times, as you’re watching Mark and Naomi and their kids, you might start to imagine you’re watching a blended-family drama, perhaps of the Hallmark variety. There’s great irony in Naomi’s easy acceptance of Mark and Ellie, because the cop who asks all the right questions at work asks practically none about her new next-door neighbors. But all that matters to Naomi is that Ellie’s friendship is helping her son through a troubling adolescence. And so she relaxes — and so do we. She lets us forget about the killings and the feedings — and we enjoy watching Mark and Naomi’s own friendship develop. And all the oddities in Mark’s life that she chooses to dismiss don’t make her look oblivious; she just seems generous. She can see from Mark’s demeanor that the years have been cruel to him, and she’s willing to give him time to open up.

Bichir is surrounded by actors with a welcoming presence — it’s crucial to the design. It’s what keeps Mark focused; it’s what keeps him going. Kevin Carroll is the best friend you dream about — even in your worst nightmares: the kind who’ll not only give you your old job back and boast about your culinary skills — but who’ll join you on a stakeout and help you dispose of a corpse. The one who’s proven the perfect choice to be your daughter’s godfather, not merely because he can be counted on to bring a smile to her face, but because you can count on him to rush a vial of blood to her while it’s still fresh. And as Ellie, who’s spent a decade trapped in a 12-year-old body, Madison Taylor Baez has that same sort of loving spirit. It’s a remarkable performance from one so young. (The actress herself is only 11.) You understand how her sheltered existence leads her to bond with a pre-teen who’s feeling odd and anxious. (As Isaiah, Ian Foreman is every kid who’s been bullied for being different, but he doesn’t allow the character to become pitiable or precious.) But living for a decade in a 12-year-old body has made her a complicated creature. On the surface she looks like a suitable friend for Isaiah — but when she crawls into bed next to him, to comfort him, there’s something disturbing about it. He’s ingenuous in a way she’ll never again be. And conversely, when she confronts an older vampire near the end of the season, we see all the signs of young womanhood waiting to blossom — but the growing pains she’s been denied and the life lessons left unlearned allow her to be easily manipulated, as a child would be. Hinderaker refuses to define Ellie as “a 22-year-old in a 12-year-old body“; he creates something more nuanced and unsettling, and Baez — as if otherworldly in her own right — captures it all.

There’s a lot of setup in Let the Right One In, but nothing that feels like setup. There are twists you don’t see coming, and a stunner of a narrative reset in episode 5. And its themes are beautifully unstressed: how Mark’s protectiveness has rubbed off on Ellie, leading her to look after Isaiah; how Ellie and Isaiah's bond stems from a shared sense of solitary; and how Mark and Naomi‘s easy friendship springs from a common understanding of the challenges of caring for a special child. As reconceived for the small screen, Let the Right One In is about parents and children. It’s about the lessons we pass on to our children without ever realizing it, and about the legacies we receive from our parents without ever knowing it. And it’s about how the scars of our upbringing leave their mark. Try as we might, we can't undo the damage of our past.

We see that most clearly in the plot that runs parallel to these two — that completes the trio of intersecting story-lines — in which a father (Željko Ivanek) has worked to cure his grown son of vampirism, but sensing his time is limited, turns the project over to his estranged daughter. And as much as she swears to save her brother in a humane manner that reflects her rebellion against everything her father stood for, she not only ends up adopting his methods, but — in the final reel — his malice. (As the daughter, Grace Gummer is the one weak link in the cast. Nothing she does is awful; she doesn’t grind the piece to a halt, like her sister Louisa did in The Gilded Age. But playing Ivanek’s onscreen daughter — and unconsciously having to assume the ruthless self-interest that Ivanek has honed to an art form — is simply beyond her. You can’t help but feel that the final episode, in which she's asked to drive the narrative, suffers a bit from her limitations.)

Most everyone in Let the Right One In has been scarred: by what they’ve seen, by what they’ve done. It’s a series about the savage world we’ve left to our children — and our powerlessness to help them navigate it. These are big themes, and Hinderaker balances them beautifully. And he knows, too, how to offset them. The maturity that Ellie has gained during her 10-year journey has allowed her and her father to develop a healthy understanding. She’s anxious to be cured, but she doesn’t expect him to suffer endlessly to make that happen. And on the rare occasions that the two of them manage to enjoy themselves, the story becomes heartwarming in a way you didn’t expect. You glimpse the bond the two of them shared back when life was “normal”; you ache for them, but your heart also soars at watching them recapture that joy — however fleetingly.

And their bond asserts itself in wonderful ways. Ellie and Mark share a gift for the theatrical. It’s there in the way she transforms Isaiah’s failing magic routine with an act of vampiric wizardry, and in the way he bakes Isaiah a birthday cake that’s at once optical illusion and conjuring trick. And when the two of them treat Isaiah to a birthday party at Coney Island — an evening Naomi later calls “perfect”: perhaps the happiest she’s ever seen her son — the screen itself practically bursts with delight. Hinderaker indulges in bits as hoary as “girl with super powers shocks unwitting barker at strongman game” — but he lingers just long enough for us to share Ellie and Isaiah’s exhilaration, then cuts away. He refuses to indulge in the clichés, but he’s happy to make use of them; he knows full well that those sorts of images are tied to our own childhood, and to the things that brought us pleasure when we were young. He understands that for us, too, those moments might well represent the happiest we’ve ever been. For a drama so consumed with suffering and slaughter, the mood of Let the Right One In often turns uncommonly bright — festive, even. It’s all part of Hinderaker’s plan. He understands that it’s hope that gets us through the horror — and it’s hope that prolongs it.

*****

Ever since Lucy Chambers was a child, she’s been haunted by nightmares — nightmares that end when she awakens at exactly 3:33 AM (the “devil’s hour”). During the day those nightmares reemerge as visions that she dismisses as déjà vu. But deep down she knows better. She’s long sensed — even before she had the wisdom to understand it or the opportunity to confirm it — that she was getting glimpses into the future.

That’s Lucy Chambers’ gift — or is it a curse? No matter: she sets it aside. She doesn’t overanalyze it. From the time she was a child, she learned to compartmentalize her visions. Lucy works for child and social services; she oversees a large department, and she’s good at what she does. She’s mission oriented — and detail oriented. Characters aren’t coming up to her urging her to take time off or cautioning her that she’s “lost perspective”; her personal issues don’t prompt her to make huge and humbling professional mistakes. She has the sort of intense focus more common to a police detective than a social worker (when pressed, she even has the moves of a police detective); she’s learned how to disguise her distractions. Objects metamorphose before her eyes. A drawing pinned to a fridge suddenly morphs into multiple drawings, as if she’s seeing the same refrigerator from an earlier or later point in time. She makes note of it — then files it away. It gets inside her head — literally — but characters aren’t snapping their fingers asking “where did you go?” She’s gotten good at multitasking. When she greets a new neighbor and gets a disturbing vision of her badly burned, she knows she’s seen something significant, but it doesn’t derail the conversation.

Only her son Isaac gets the better of her. He’s the anomaly in her life: her obsession. Lucy bore a son with seemingly no capacity to experience emotion — who never laughs, or cries, or even asks for a hug. But she’s learned to handle that, too. To accept it and embrace it as yet another unusual feature of her life: one she won’t permit to impinge upon her work. But still, she’s desperate to make Isaac love her; she knows full well it’s not an emotion he’s capable of feeling, but nonetheless she convinces herself that if she just tries harder, she’ll manage it. And so her outpouring of love becomes an exercise in frustration. It’s a cruel irony: she can save every child except her own. Isaac has visions — nightmares like his mother, but other kinds as well: images of people who clearly aren’t there. Lucy can accept her own apparitions, but she’s frantic to get to the root of Isaac’s. Why does he retreat into this make-believe world? Lucy is tightly focused, but it’s only with her son that she becomes tightly wound. She leaves herself so vulnerable to hurt that anger gets the best of her, and when she struggles to understand how his mind works, she lashes out, then instantly regrets it.

Lucy is played by Jessica Raine, with an intelligence and intensity that are irresistible. Writer Tom Moran gifts her a great role. Moran has precious few professional credits on his résumé, but he has a good ear for dialogue, and for keeping it fresh. There was only one time during Amazon Prime’s six-part series where I guessed a line in advance, and it was one of those parallel-construction setups like “I’m not here to tell you what you want to know — I’m here to tell you…” (I screamed at the screen, “What you need to know.”) I can’t tell you how often Philip and I sit in the living room watching a TV show, and a character says something, and one of us predicts the next line. (The other will turn to the one who guessed and joke, “Did you write this?”) Moran captures the cadences of everyday speech without falling prey to its predictability. His characters have such rich inner lives — and such unusual backstories — that their lines have a way of eschewing the expected.

The Devil’s Hour is horror-infused mystery — a paranormal procedural, you could call it — with a Big Reveal at the end. But Moran plays scrupulously fair — not merely providing clues, but doubling down on them. He works through deception, but not concealment: the puzzle pieces are all there, if you can figure out where to place them. In some ways, his approach reminded me of Ashley Pharoah’s The Living and the Dead. In that 2015 series, there were anachronisms you dismissed because that’s how your mind is trained to work: to weed out the details that don’t make sense. Pharaoh exploited our eagerness to filter out inconsistencies; Moran toys with our “go to” responses. He senses the explanations we’ll default to — and takes full advantage of that. He’s savvy enough about mysteries to get us hooked and keep us guessing. And he has a good visual sense; some of the spookiest moments seem tailor-made for the camera. There are continuity glitches that belie Moran’s relative inexperience, but what he lacks in finesse he makes up for in enthusiasm.

And shrewdly, he uses the lead detective, played by Nikesh Patel, as an unlikely audience surrogate. It’s typical of these types of dramas that the DI is the disbeliever: the one who spends altogether too much time undermining the apparatus of the plot by denying the truth and slowing the investigation. Here, even when presented with the possibility of the paranormal, DI Ravi Dhillon remains unfazed. He senses in Lucy someone he can trust; she confides that she catches glimpses of the future as a sort of déjà vu, and it doesn’t alarm him, and it doesn’t deter him. He’s not a believer himself, but he believes in her. There’s a chemistry there that he can’t deny, and it makes him willing to step into uncharted territory. At times, he seems as much suitor as sleuth, and although The Devil’s Hour never succumbs to a romantic subplot (the teleplay makes it clear that Lucy and Ravi aren’t heading towards matrimony — at least not in this lifetime), the actors and the characters have such natural chemistry that you find yourself as smitten as they are.

Explanations come in the final installment, and they involve world building on a monumental scale. But given how beautifully the clues have been dropped, they doesn’t require much of a leap of faith. I won’t say that every question I had was answered — not even after I scoured the internet for an hour or so — but nonetheless I came away impressed and content. I was left feeling that Moran knew exactly what he was doing, and had planned it down to the tiniest detail — and if some of those details didn’t make it as emphatically onto the screen as I might’ve liked, it didn’t diminish my awe at his accomplishment.

And a lot of that comes down to Peter Capaldi, as the one charged with making sense of it all. I can’t delve into his role without giving too much away, but suffice it to say that Capaldi, by necessity, serves as somewhat of a supporting player through the first five episodes, until he takes the reins in the sixth. And that’s where the casting is such genius — that’s when you understand what drew Capaldi to the role — because it takes an actor of his gifts to make this sort of plotting possible: where a shadowy character appropriates the narrative late in the game, and proposes a theory that runs counter to the one you’ve formulated in your head: one he makes seem — despite its scale, despite its pretensions — not merely plausible but persuasive. Playing a vigilante masquerading as a savior (or is it a savior mistaken for a vigilante?), Capaldi radiates pathological conviction — but he lets you see through to the sweet child he once was. He never loses sight of the more submissive traits it took his character lifetimes to overcome, or the scars that transformed him into the man he is today. He knows precisely how to win you over. Other works of literature and film have prepared you for the concepts that Moran weaves together here, but Capaldi makes them feel fresh. It’s a shatteringly good performance that depends not only on the authority of the actor, but on the trust and goodwill he’s built with audiences. You come away realizing that in casting — just as in content — Moran has it all worked out.

Want more? Check out an essay called "Negotations", in praise of three series that brightened my 2022: Minx, The Ipcress File and Inside Man; an essay called "Men in the Middle," highlighting four recent series that owe much of their success to the onscreen personas of their leading men: The Tourist, This Is Going to Hurt, The Responder and Around the World in 80 Days; an essay entitled "Rough Edges," in praise of two addictive comedies that I discovered in 2021, Back to Life and The Other Two; another entitled "Private Faces," highlighting two spectacular series that emerged in the fall of 2020, Roadkill and Life; and a fifth called "Unwilling Victims," taking a look at three recent series by and about women: The Trial of Christine Keeler, Deadwater Fell and Flesh and Blood. I offer up The Five Best TV Shows You Might Not Be Watching, Five Foreign TV Dramas You Shouldn't Miss, and my most personal essay, inspired by the death of my puppy Czerny in June of 2021, The 10 Most Comforting TV Episodes About Death.

If you like in-depth looks at hit shows, I delve into Rhoda Season 3, Maude Season 2, Newhart Season 7, WKRP in Cincinnati Season 4 and Bewitched Season 2; serve up my 10 Best Episodes of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Designing Women, WKRP in Cincinnati and Kate & Allie; pen an appreciation of Mike & Molly; and offer up some thoughts as to why The New Adventures of Old Christine took such a tumble in quality over its five seasons. Or if you prefer dramas, check out my write-ups of of Criminal Minds Season 8, Judging Amy Season 6, Voyager Season 4, Doctor Who Series 8, Cold Case Season 4, Gilmore Girls Season 7 (and the subsequent, ill-judged Netflix miniseries), and fourteen essays devoted to all the seasons of the great nighttime soap Knots Landing, starting here. I also look back at Murder, She Wrote and pick out The 10 Best "Murder She Wrote" Mysteries: not (necessarily) the best episodes, but the best whodunnits.