[Review] The Innocents (2021)
Eskil Vogt, Academy Award-nominated writer of The Worst Person In The World (2021), debuted his second feature The Innocents in the Un Certain Regard section of the 2021 Cannes Film Festival. The film is now available on demand and in select US theaters as of May 13, 2022.
Content Warning: Although the gore and physical violence are relatively mild by horror standards, The Innocents is undeniably painful to watch and should be approached with caution. It depicts various forms of childhood trauma and abuse at close emotional range and includes depictions animal cruelty. One scene with a cat is particularly alarming, so animal lovers beware.
A brief synopsis could give the false impression that The Innocents is just another genre film about a group of kids whose special bond awakens supernatural powers (for good or ill). But The Innocents is not that kind of movie. Nor is it a familiar tale of creepy kids whose cherubic exteriors conceal a singular darkness lurking inside. It is, however, among the most deeply painful, disturbing films I’ve seen in recent memory.
The Innocents, the second feature from Norwegian Writer/Director Eskil Vogt, willfully defies classification to create a uniquely intimate, uncanny experience. Vogt weaves parallel threads of family drama and supernatural thriller into a vivid, emotionally rich slice of life—think The Florida Project meets Let The Right One In. This restrained arthouse chiller is more stillness than action: moments slide together and stretch apart in fits and starts. Vogt’s distinctly languid pacing won’t be for everyone, but it absolutely worked for me. Vogt masterfully highlights the psychic chasm between childhood and adulthood, how children perceive the world so differently than the adults who control their lives. The film transports us back in time to childhood—though not to the idealized versions we’ve fabricated for ourselves from a distance. Vogt’s thoughtful, nuanced film captures the emotional richness and moral ambiguity of childhood without dulling the cruel edges. And these edges cut deep.
The Innocents follows four young residents of an Oslo housing complex who form a special bond over summer break. In contrast to the dark, cool tones we’ve come to expect from the horror genre, the film’s bright sunshine and warm palette conjure the magic of early summer vacations—when many of us first taste unstructured time that’s ours to fill. Sensory details tug the threads of viewers’ embodied childhood memories, adding a tactile element to the visual. Bubble wrap is popped. Scabs are picked and eaten. Wet sand worms are squished under rain boots. The film’s success hinges on the incredible performances of its four young leads, aged seven through eleven at the time of filming. Despite their age and inexperience, the children feel authentic in a way that is rarely captured on screen.
Sisters Ida (Rakel Lenora Flottum) and Anna (Alva Brynsmo Ramstad), approximately nine and eleven, have just moved into their family’s new apartment. Their well-meaning parents are clearly stretched thin in the wake of the big move, and we get the sense that the family could really use a break from one another. Ida is tasked with looking after her nonverbal older sister Anna, who’s described as being on the autism spectrum (though she is played by a neurotypical actor). Nine is young to be forced into a caretaking role, and Ida resents the idea of spending summer break with her sister in tow. Without verbal communication, Ida struggles to connect with Anna, or even to see her as a thinking, feeling person. In several excruciating scenes, Ida finds ways to secretly torture Anna in plain sight, knowing full well that Anna is unable to cry out or tell on her. Ida observes Anna’s reactions with a mixture of detachment and confusion. We can see the gears turning in her mind: can people really feel pain if they can’t express it? Is anybody really in there? How can we know?
The sisters eventually befriend two other children on the social margins. Ida meets Ben (Sam Ashraf), a fellow newcomer excluded from the larger playground scene. He is repeatedly rejected and bullied by the other kids whenever he tries to join them. Although he keeps things bottled up, Ben’s home life is a heartbreaking nightmare of abuse and neglect. Foreshadowing later events, his unacknowledged pain is begging for a release valve. Like Ida, Ben seeks out opportunities to hurt vulnerable others, although his appetite eventually proves too much for Ida to stomach. Sweet, thoughtful Aisha (Mina Yasmin Bremseth Asheim) joins the group when she forms an unexpected special bond with Anna. While socially isolated by her vitiligo, Aisha is emotionally attuned to the world around her, picking up on things that others don’t. Although Aisha’s mother is often overwhelmed by single parenthood or incapacitated by depression, it’s clear that Aisha knows what it is to be loved.
Mostly unsupervised during the long summer days, these outcasts quickly form a tight-knit circle, roaming the playground and adjacent forest in a parallel world of their own making. The supernatural elements are ultimately secondary to the unfolding psychological drama, functioning mostly as metaphor. Vogt’s subdued, observational style keeps the film firmly grounded in reality. As the group’s connection grows, so do the children’s budding psychic abilities. These mysterious powers are never explained, and that’s just fine. The supernatural elements mostly manifest as atmospheric psychological tension: billowing curtains, fogging windows, clenched fists— no glowing orbs in sight.
Stunningly shot by Sturla Brandth Grøvlen, The Innocents has a hypnotic visual language all its own that centers the childhood experience in a way I’ve never seen before. Eschewing the ubiquitous middle shot almost completely, the camera sweeps between close-ups and wide shots. In close shots, the camera gravitates towards details that might catch a child’s eye but go unnoticed by adults in the same space: a bright speck of plastic in a handful of sand, small pink brush bristles rasping through doll hair, houseplant tendrils casting undulating shadows in the dark. The juxtaposition between wide shots and close-ups magnifies the distance between the worlds adults and children experience. Adults appear only in wide shots, reinforcing a sense that caregivers are aloof and inaccessible. The viewer is most removed when adults physically lower themselves to child level, crouching on the sidewalk or perching on the bed. In those moments, we feel distant from children and parents both, and our hearts sink as they just talk past each other. Gustaf Berger’s skillful sound design enhances the anxiety of separation: adult conversations sound muffled, fragmented, far away. Hearing and understanding are different things. Children often experience huge emotions that feel like life and death, but lack the language to communicate them to adults who could protect or soothe them. In The Innocents, the danger is real, and this disconnect has deadly consequences.
Most horror films that feature children center the adult perspective, playing on adult audiences’ growing alienation from the lived experience of childhood. The creepy child trope is a nightmare of projection: a chimera formed in the mismatch between idealized innocence and unimaginable menace. No matter how much havoc they wreak, most creepy kids are fairly one-dimensional: bad seeds are “born wrong,” products of defective DNA, or possessed by some dark external force. While classic creepy kids can certainly deliver scares, we almost never empathize with them beyond a superficial level. Vogt has upped the stakes by centering the lived emotional experience of childhood for an entire film, and it’s a devastating ride. The Innocents provides a chilling glimpse into children as they are, not as we’d like them to be. This film is an incredible work of art that I’ll undoubtedly return to again and again, and I can’t recommend it enough.