No./6 The hidden gem: an arthouse superhero horror
The director of supernatural drama The Innocents on how he made a superhero film unlike any other
“I HAVE KIDS, and I love them to death, but they’re also a mystery,” says writer-director Eskil Vogt. The sheer weirdness of young children and their odd perception of the world was what inspired him to create The Innocents, a superhero-tinged horror drama that won plaudits when it premiered at Cannes last month.
It’s the story of four young children, between six and 11, on a Swedish housing estate on their summer holidays. At first they’re just mucking about in the woods, but gradually they demonstrate uncanny powers to one another, like mind-reading or psychokinesis. “Everything is intense and magical,” says Vogt of childhood. “You don’t know the limits of what’s possible. So you just integrate that into your reality.”
When you’re seven or eight, after all, who’s to say it’s not normal to move objects with your mind? The world is already full of new experiences to integrate. To figure it all out, Vogt managed a quartet of extraordinary child performances by Rakel Lenora Fløttum as our plucky heroine, Ida; Sam Ashraf as the neglected Ben; Mina Yasmin Bremseth Asheim as the thoughtful Aisha; and Alva Brynsmo Ramstad as Anna, Ida’s sister with autism. That casting was the result of a year-long search and workshops, starting with literally thousands of kids and whittling it down to a handful, and extensive research into autism before creating Anna’s character.
Vogt rewrote the script, changing ethnicity and gender to fit the kids best qualified for the job (“Okay, now the main character is a girl instead of a boy: what do I need to change? I was surprised. The name. It was minimal”) and then worked to keep the crew small, the camera close and the shooting process fun so that the kids’ performances would be as naturalistic as possible. Of course, such powers are all fun and games until someone gets hurt. “These are kids with different psyches, a differently developed sense of empathy, different interior moral compasses. That’s important, right?” So while the film has a building sense of unease, there are moments of wonder, too: think Chronicle without the found-footage angle, or Let The Right One In with a bit less claret.
Even as they test the limits of their powers, the film keeps its focus close in on the kids, to the extent that even their parents aren’t sure what’s happening. “That’s part of the game,” says Vogt. “Extreme things happen, and it’s high stakes, quite intense at times. But it happens on a scale where maybe there’s a life and death struggle going on, something really spectacular between the kids, but if you cut to a wide shot an adult could walk by and not know what was happening.” Adults, after all, know there’s no such thing as superpowers. The question is whether their uncanny kids are convinced of the same thing.