The Innocents
Directed by Eskil Vogt
Running time: 1hr57 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE
Rakel Lenora Fløttum stars in The Innocents
What is it about telekinetic kids that storytellers keep coming back to? Such abilities would be extraordinary in anyone. In a child, however, there’s such disparity between their outward strength and the scale and influence of these psychic powers that it seems doubly uncanny, against the laws of nature twice over. The specially gifted poppets of Eskil Vogt’s stylish, unnerving supernatural drama The Innocent look as harmless as Matilda, but turn out to be as dangerous as Carrie. As with Carrie, it’s not their fault — there’s just something bigger than their bodies at work in them, ready to burst out and change life as they, and we, know it. From a certain angle, The Innocents might be seen as a horror film; from another, it’s a lo-fi, unusually intriguing superhero origin story.
The difference could lie in how you respond to the four 7- to 11-year-old characters driving Vogt’s story, and the remarkable young actors playing them. Vogt, a regular collaborator of Joachim Trier who made a splash in 2014 with the terrific agoraphobia thriller Blind, clearly knows children well: these aren’t the precocious, cute-on-cue kidbots you might see in a Hollywood version of this story, but plausibly real, moody human beings whose behaviour can be challenging even when it isn’t paranormal. The film’s point of view is primarily that of pre-teen Ida (Rakel Lenora Fløttum), lonely and adrift after moving to a new housing estate with her parents and older sister Anna (Alva Brynsmo Ramstad), who has autism. She finds a tentative friend in Ben (Sam Ashraf), whose seemingly infectious ability to move things with his mind is pretty cool, but whose more sadistic impulses are less so. Things get eerier from there, but The Innocents is best experienced, well, innocent: it’s no spoiler to say, however, that Vogt has crafted a kind of extreme fairytale on the nature of being different, shorn of tidy lessons or happy endings — which may just be beginnings anyway.
THE INNOCENTS (2021) Written by Eskil Vogt | Shot by Sturla Brandth Grøvlen | Edited by Jens Christian Fodstad
This review originally ran at the 74th Cannes Film Festival