The Innocents is a stylish, slender teen romance
Young lovers play a Romeo and Juliet pair whose families are connected in mysterious ways
From among the transformational metaphors for teenage alienation — turning into a vampire, turning into a human spider — “The Innocents,” a handsome new Netflix series, goes with the plain vanilla variety. Its heroine, a 16-year-old British girl named June, is a basic shape-shifter, who takes on other people’s forms when she’s frightened: a girl she’s dancing with, a nurse, a burly Norwegian who’s trying to kidnap her.
Her ability is, in the nature of the teenage supernatural-science fiction melodrama, a curse whose benefits must be discovered gradually. In the case of “The Innocents,” that process is very gradual, stretching across the eight episodes of the show’s first season (now available). The story’s thinness is balanced by its stylishness, its broody romanticism and its charming leads, however, and it’s likely to find a large and enthusiastic audience.
The young leads are Sorcha Groundsell and Percelle Ascott, consistently charming and believable as June and Harry, a Juliet and Romeo pair whose families’ woes are connected in mysterious ways. As the series opens, they’re planning to go on the run because her smotheringly protective dad, aware of the power she has yet to discover, is about to move her to a remote Scottish island.
Meanwhile, Guy Pearce, the one well-known member of the cast, monitors events from an achingly beautiful Norwegian fiord — straight out of a 19thcentury Romantic poem, if you’re tracking influences. There his character, Halvorson, runs some sort of retreat and research facility, a Nordic version of the XMen’s Xavier mansion.
The two storylines converge almost immediately, and June and Harry’s flight — which carries them to London and then off across the North Sea — becomes a season-long quest to figure out what’s wrong with her. The audience is on that same quest, because “The Innocents,” for this season anyway, is one of the myriad ration-out-the-clues pasttense mysteries — as with “Westworld,” say, or “Marvel’s Cloak & Dagger,” it’s less about what’s happening now than about what happened then. Much of the story is a slow buildup to some key flashbacks that take six or seven episodes to arrive.
Though build isn’t quite the right word. The story spins in place, with people chasing each other around in scenes and episodes that amount to stall tactics, until it’s finally time to bring everyone together for the answers.
The show’s creators and primary writers, Hania Elkington and Simon Duric, are new to the showrunning game — he’s a longtime storyboard artist producing his first series, and she’s a writer of short stories and hot but unproduced screenplays who’s also bringing her first project to the screen. On the evidence of “The Innocents,” neither of them yet knows or cares much about how to establish character through action. With the exception of the brave and impossibly noble Harry (Ascott gives the show’s most touching performance), people define themselves through talk, talk, talk, and the story isn’t developed so much as uncovered.
Elkington and Duric could also be a little more rigorous when it comes to narrative contrivances. One aspect of the shape-shifting premise — that shifters still look like themselves in mirrors or other reflections — is central to the plot but never explained, and feels like an irritating storytelling shortcut. (It’s also awfully convenient that Harry’s mother is a detective with a cold case that connects her to June’s family.)
These various quibbles largely arise from the creators’ choice to situate “The Innocents” far to the teen-angst side of its particular scale, rather than the actionadventure side. It could fit easily on CW or Freeform, where it would be even more swoony and mopey than the rest of the lineup, though with a measure of British understatement.
Scene by scene, as June and Harry beautifully dither to a soundtrack of mournful pop (Phoebe Bridgers, Sigrid, Autograf ), the show is quite easy to watch. The shape-shifting premise proves a flexible, even powerful frame for the usual teenage quandaries — feeling different, being misunderstood by clueless parents, wanting to explore other, kinkier modes of life. A scene in which June encounters another shifter and risks losing her own identity altogether delivers some real emotion. In the highly likely second season, perhaps the pace will pick up.