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When I go to preview screenings, I feel like there’s an implied social contract: if I can do so honestly, I should talk the flicks up to pals or otherwise promote it. But I can’t honestly give either of these films a strong recommendation.

I laughed a lot at Ghost Town, mostly because Ricky Gervais (star of the original The Office and Extras, if you’ve somehow missed either) is a really funny guy. (Kristin Wiig and Michael-Leon Wooley also shine in bit parts.) Gervais’s Ghost Town character, Bertram Pincus, is cut from the same despicable but oddly endearing cloth as David Brent and Andy Millman, and roughly as distinct from them as they are from each other.

But I was frustrated by Ghost Town because it’s both a genre romantic comedy and a genre “guy who sees dead people movie;” it’s hidebound by the conventions of its genres in almost exactly the way The Office wasn’t. Gervais didn’t write it; David Koepp and John Kamps did; their combined credits include efforts like Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie and Mission:Impossible. So while the details of the dialogue were often satisfyingly surprising and funny, the overall plot arc followed a far-too predictable trajectory.

***

Director Tomas ALfredson and screenwriter John Ajvide Lindqvist (adapting his own novel) might be insulted to find a capsule review of their Let the Right One In (Låt den rätte komma in) paired with one of Ghost Town; a supernatural theme and the fact that I saw both at a promotional screening is about the extent of their commonality. There’s considerable craft in Let the Right One, and the film is pleasantly elliptical, leaving many gaps open to interpretation. It’s certainly not constrained by many of the conventions of the vampire movie, and it’s very unlike mainstream Hollywood horror films. My wonderful girlfriend and I spent quite a while afterward puzzling over aspects of the film, not least what the title means, why it was set when it was, and whether one brief shot was startlingly gratuitous nudity or something else completely.
But while I thought Let the Right One In was in many ways a good film, I can’t say I enjoyed it. Part of that is because of what I (thought I) knew about the movie going in; I wasn’t expecting it to be so relentlessly grim.
But then again, I’ve seen a lot of other relentlessly grim movies I liked better.

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