Chillingly brilliant and truly unnerving Norwegian thriller
The Innocents (R16, 117 mins) Directed by Eskil Vogt Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett ★★★★ In Norwegian with English subtitles
The Innocents is a contemporary Norwegian thriller. In a modern apartment complex in an unnamed city, 9-year-old Ida is beginning to realise she might have some abilities she has not been aware of before.
Her friendship with neighbour Ben, a boy of around her age, is beginning to yield odd results. Ben can seemingly levitate small objects. He is also capable of dropping a stray cat down a multistorey stairwell, just to see if it will live. At which point, I thought hard about getting up and walking out.
Writer and director Eskil Vogt (he wrote the Oscar-nominated The Worst Person In The World) has composed something uncompromisingly dense and confronting here, then laid it out in an understated and coolly observational fashion that lets the terrors accumulate so quietly, you may finally catch some of the implications hours after the film has finished. The friendship between the two possibly psychically-linked and empowered kids plays out as a measured and ice-old meditation on the nature of childhood, the point at which we develop an understanding that ‘‘right’’ and ‘‘wrong’’ are tangible concepts and not just words that parents say, and of the children who maybe never make that vital step.
Or, The Innocents can be read as a query as to whether ‘‘morality’’ serves a purpose, or whether it is just an adult invention to shield them from the wrath and reality of their children. You may even see the film as a scalpel-sharp satire of the ‘‘superhero origin myth’’ genre.
This is a chilly and brilliant film, worth seeing as an exercise in writing, for the incredible performances of Rakel Lenora Flottum as Ida and Sam Ashraf as Ben – and especially for the cinematography of Sturla Brandth Grovlen. Grovlen shot the singletake Berlin-set crime thriller Victoria in 2015, and followed that with the Icelandic comedy Rams.
In the past few years, Grovlen has been behind the camera on Last And First Men and the gorgeous Another Round.
Grovlen shoots The Innocents as a procession of perfectly weighted frames, almost subliminally drawing our attention to the quiet, still centre at which the real action of the film, so often internalised and unspoken, is unfolding.
The Innocents is one of those rare films that I hope is one day remade in English, so it can reach a wider audience and start more conversations. I might even hope that the film is made a little leaner and brisker. But I especially want Sturla Brandth Grovlen to still be behind the camera.
The Innocents is now screening in select cinemas nationwide.