Ida (Rakel Lenora Fløttum) and her sister Anna (Alva Brynsmo Ramstad) are normal girls in The Innocents. They seem that way, at least most of the time. But, in reality, both manifest inexplicable abilities that, as time passes, become more brutal. However, neither one nor the other fully understand what is happening. They only know that they feel hate, anger or rage, and that there will be consequences. So hideous and fearsome as to be repulsive.
In The Innocents, the most violent and distressing scenes take place between seemingly innocent laughter. Worse still, in parks full of toys or among the echo of a disconsolate child crying. A chilling landscape that makes the film have a certain bitter aftertaste of an inexplicable event. But director Eskil Vogt uses that curious perception of the creepy to build a new look at fear. In the best of cases, a totally original journey through disturbing spaces about danger, violence and, in the end, death.
In fact, the whole argument The Innocents It takes place in the midst of ideas that surpass their small protagonists. Not because they are elaborate or strange, but because each of them they are so young that they have not yet questioned guilt or violence. From fear to awe, every emotion is experienced with equal intensity.
This is what the script makes clear, while showing the daily life of its very young characters. None reach the early years of adolescence. Most look at the world with wide, surprised eyes. Like any other child who is not yet out of kindergarten, emotions are everything. As powerful as they are confusing, on the verge of the uncontrollable.
The Innocents
In The Innocents, the most violent and distressing scenes take place amid the laughter of children. Worse still, in parks full of toys or among the echo of a disconsolate child crying. A chilling landscape that makes the film have a bitter aftertaste of an inexplicable event. But director Eskil Vogt uses that curious perception of the creepy to build a new look at fear. In the best of cases, a totally original journey through disturbing spaces about danger, violence and, in the end, death.
The Innocents and its naive darkness
It is a homogeneous moral landscape that the director also transfers to the physical world. In the large Norwegian residential building in which the story takes place, everything is everyday and identical to each other. Which makes Ida just another nine-year-old who understands that the world around her has limits. She who cries when she falls and scrapes her knees or rages out of sheer frustration.
Except that Ida and her sister Anna’s experiences are unlike any other child their age. The horror movie soon raises the possibility that they have unknown physical abilities. Some terrifying, others downright dangerous. All of them must go through their tiny vision of what surrounds them. It is that small window to the world that makes The Innocents be so disconcerting. Gradually, Ida will show that her powers, or at any rate the physical experience of her emotions, is more disturbing than might be supposed.
A macabre scenario in which the concepts of guilt, moral responsibility or even fear are still blurred and confused. But for the characters, the primitive capacity for evil trumps that adult perception of a specific setting. It becomes clear once they begin to discover their unique — and sometimes terrifying — abilities. Much more, when it is evident that terror is connected not with depravity, but with astonishment.
Children who are only children in the midst of horror
Despite the tragic and often bloody events that occur in the film, the script refuses to judge what it shows. Either because it is about children or because each of their actions is driven by primal emotions. No matter the answer, the argument has a strangely neutral tone. One that links to a deep dimension of inexplicable fear. Can someone very young really be evil?
It is not the first time that the horror genre has asked itself similar questions. Vogt does it with an ease that is chilling for his honesty. Where does the inner darkness come from? Is this behavior learned or assumed as part of human nature? The Innocents you don’t want to answer those questions. But it does make the viewer inevitably formulate them.
After all, it’s only about children. Small enough to cry in fear after committing horrific deeds. Little ones with yellow ponchos and naive faces, who hide in the dark and embody something fearsome and distressing.
Childhood turned into something dark, in a chaotic version of the adult fear of the inexplicable. If maturity is a transit between desires and temptations, what could innocence be? The film does not ask simple questions and dares to speculate on fear in its purest form. A condition that was also part of less elaborate, but equally twisted, discourses during a year in which terror evolved into new and painful spaces.
The haunting and tiny terror of The Innocents
At first sight, The Innocents shows the same analysis of the action that usually includes a superhero movie. The evolution of the power of its characters relates it to an origin story. In fact, it might have some parallels with the brutal Brightburn: Son of Darkness by David Yarovsky. Both delve into their small protagonists from the observation of the strangeness and, later, the sinister that is hidden in a second reading on the terrifying.
But The Innocents stands entirely on the codes of terror. As it progresses, and especially once it becomes clear that the phenomenon surrounding Ida and Anna is not unique, the script darkens. However, not because of the cruelty that is explicitly displayed on screen or the terrors that are shown with nightmarish slowness. The really creepy thing about the movie is the fact that to state that each man, woman and child maintains a redoubt of latent darkness. One that could wake up at the least expected moment and in the most brutal way.
The InnocentsTraversing all layers of fear to take his characters to a gritty, monstrous quality, digs into the frightening from a distance. Each spectator will have to decide what moves the mechanisms of the crude interior landscape that from time to time is shown in all its horror. Are children the announcement of evil in the world of adults? As one of the characters looks in amazement at all of his ability to deal damage, the question is unavoidable. Also, the terror that hides in the periphery. Perhaps the most sinister point of a movie full of innuendo.