THE INNOCENTS
Suffer little children
RELEASED 20 MAY/6 JUNE 2022 | 15 | Download 20 May
(also in selected cinemas), VOD 6 June Director Eskil Vogt
Cast Rakel Lenora Fløttum,
Alva Brynsmo Ramstad, Sam Ashraf, Mina Yasmin Bremseth Asheim
Young children can be very cruel sometimes, especially if they haven’t yet fully developed a sense of empathy for the emotions and physical pain of others. What if that tendency to do things like pinch your sister was combined with the kind of fantastical abilities that we more usually see on-screen being employed with confident control by adults, or tentatively explored by teenagers?
That’s the question at the heart of the latest film by writer/director Eskil Vogt, who previously tackled slightly similar themes with his script for the Carrie-esque Thelma. Set in a nondescript Norwegian housing estate, it’s tightly focused on four kids aged seven to 11. Adults are very much background figures here, and the parents have no awareness of what’s going on in the secret world of their children.
Early on, these are not exactly the sort of abilities that would draw the attention of Professor Xavier: moving a bottle top slightly as it falls; keeping a pan lid spinning on the floor. But as the children’s inexplicable powers grow in scope, encompassing things such as snapping a tree in half and telepathically controlling random grown-ups, they become increasingly dangerous – especially when wedded to the boundary testing and childish vengefulness of Ben (Sam Ashraf ).
Making use of slow zooms, lens flare and warm summery tones, and set to a score of unobtrusive thrums and gongs, it’s a plausibly realist take on the sort of scenario that usually inexorably leads to a pitched battle with a multimillion-dollar effects budget. But there are no buildings being wrecked or cars being flipped here, and the final showdown, when it comes, is deliberately anticlimactic.
While Vogt says that he didn’t set out to make a film which defines itself in opposition to the superhero blockbusters which dominate today’s cinematic landscape, viewers probably can’t help but experience it that way, and the contrast is sometimes wryly comical. You don’t get a hero calling round the supervillain’s house and inviting them out to play in the MCU. Neither, usually, does the characterisation pull your sympathies to and fro. Ben is effectively the villain of the piece, and some of his actions are truly shocking, but his tearful reactions afterwards remind you that this is just a confused young boy with a lack of impulse control.
Horribly tense at times, as we wait for Ben’s next experiment or piece of score-settling (with some distressing animal cruelty early on cleverly clueing us in as to quite how poor his boundaries are), it’s a refreshingly different, sensitively handled arthouse approach to story concepts that are usually the domain of the multiplex.
One inspiration was Domu, a manga by Akira creator Katsuhiro Otomo featuring a child with extrasensory powers.
There are no buildings being wrecked or cars being flipped