Rated: TBA
Directed by: Eskil Vogt
Screenplay Written by: Eskil Vogt
Produced by: Maria Ekerhovd
Executive Producer: Axel Helgeland, Dave Bishop, Céline Dornier
Starring: Rakel Lenora Fløttum, Alva Brynsmo Ramstad, Mina Yasmin Bremseth Asheim, Sam Ashraf, Ellen Dorrit Pedersen, Morten Svartveit, Kadra Yusuf, Lisa Tønne.
Norwegian with English subtitles.
‘What do you do when someone’s mean?’
A sleeping child
Is the picture of innocence.
The shot is close.
Ida (Rakel Lenora Fløttum) has freckles on her nose.
She has an autistic sister, Anna (Alva Brynsmo Ramstad). Anna’s non-verbal. She can’t even feel a pinch.
Ida is nine years old, yet it doesn’t feel like innocence when she pinches her sister, spits from the balcony and stomps on a worm.
When writer and director, Eskil Vogt (also screenwriter of, The Worst Person in the World, ‘In Competition – Feature Films’ 2021, Festival De Cannes. See review here) was asked about the idea behind the film’s title (The Innocents) he responds,
“I think kids are beyond good and evil or rather before good and evil. But I don’t think children are little angels, that people are born pure. I think children are born without any sense of empathy or morals, we have to teach them that. That’s why I think it’s interesting to see a child doing something that we would call evil in an adult. The moral aspect is more complex since they aren’t fully formed yet.”
Ida’s family has moved, her mother (Ellen Dorrit Pedersen) tells her it’s a new school, new friends.
Ida lies back on a swing and looks at the world up-side-down.
She meets Ben (Sam Ashraf).
He’s moved around a lot.
He has a bruise on his chest.
He can also move things with his mind.
I wasn’t sure what I was getting myself into at the beginning of this film – children doing mean things is confronting.
Yet, as the film continues, the characters, the children get complicated.
The Innocents is a horror with children as the main characters, with the parents on the outside, not knowing or understanding.
It’s a film about forgotten kids, who suddenly find they have powers.
Aisha (Mina Yasmin Bremseth Asheim) who lives in the building complex, finds Anna with her mind, the film following her mind like flying through the mist of the outside.
She can hear Anna even though Anna can’t speak.
‘I’m talking to someone who isn’t here,’ Aisha tells her mother (Kadra Yusuf).
Her mother cries in secret.
When the four children are together, Ida, Ben, Anna and Aisha – they become more powerful.
But rather than focussing on the supernatural, the film is about the children exploring their new powers and how each reacts to having power, therefore revealing the truth of who they are and why.
I was haunted by this film, the power shown in the ripples of water, by the wind in the trees. Like the audience is invited into this secret world of the children as they pick scabs and dig in a sandbox, the boredom, the exploring, the violence – I believed all of it, the children the driving force of the film, shown in careful detail by cinematographer, Sturla Brandth Grøvlen.
A quietly menacing film that’s riveting, shocking and unique.