Film review: It’s all good, blood-drenched fun in Let the Wrong One In

McMahon has fun with the classic vampire tropes in Let the Wrong One In 

★★★☆☆

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. Luckily for Matt, the vampire-hunter Henry (Anthony Head) comes riding to the rescue, determined to wipe out the army of bloodsuckers, led by his ex-fiancée Sheila (Mary Murray), plaguing Dublin’s inner city.

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.

The ensemble cast leans into the grotesque exaggerations

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.

The ensemble cast leans into the grotesque exaggerations — Hilda Fay, playing Matt and Deco’s Ma, has a couple of very funny cameos — and while the script is a touch inconsistent in parts (vampires who are invisible in mirrors show up in video calls, for example), it’s all good, blood-drenched fun.

In cinemas January 20.