‘The Innocents’ Review: An Eerie, Cynical Depiction of Children Embracing Evil

Eskil Vogt’s The Innocents isn’t a remake of Jack Clayton’s 1961 horror classic of the same name, but there are enough similarities between the two to make the former seem like an homage to the latter. Both are slow-burners largely confined to one location, and they instantly envelop the audience in an ominous atmosphere. That’s in no small part due to the fact that the young characters at their center are human agents of mysterious supernatural forces. But the crucial difference between them is that the near-guiding principle of Vogt’s film is the propensity for cruelty that links the characters and the material itself.

Ida (Rakel Lenora Fløttum) and her autistic sister, Anna (Alva Brynsmo Ramstad), move with their parents to a massive Norwegian tower block that’s surrounded by an ominous forest. After their initial shyness wears off, the siblings begin to hang around Aisha (Mina Yasmin Bremseth Asheim) and Ben (Sam Ashraf), two other children living in the complex who, it turns out, possess hidden powers. These include psychokinesis and mind control, and as such The Innocents draws inevitable comparison to Joachim Trier’s Thelma, which Vogt co-wrote, especially once this film’s narrative turns to eruptions of psychic violence.

The complex where the children live is almost a character onto itself. Throughout, Vogt and cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grøvlen present the setting as an otherworldly presence, as in how the building’s tall stairwells seemingly spiral into sinister dark nothingness. Elsewhere, wide shots frame the children as tiny figures against the looming tower block. One sequence is even presented upside-down as the camera floats among the complex’s buildings during a foggy night. Through the use of such disorienting visual devices, Vogt not only subtly creates tension, but also effectively conveys Ida and Anna’s feelings of estrangement.

Ida and Anna are initially drawn to their new friends for the promise and fulfillment of their powers. Aisha, for one, can use telepathy to help the usually nonverbal Anna to speak. But after Ben shows Ida some of the tricks that he can do with his powers—such as using his mind to fling rocks in the air—The Innocents takes a turn for the gruesome that becomes hard to reconcile, namely when Ida and Ben drop a cat from a stairwell and the latter fails to levitate the critter toward the ground. From there, the powers are no longer a curiosity, but a means of inflicting torturous violence upon the other children who live in the tower block.

The title of Vogt’s film, then, is nothing if not ironic. Violence springs from the evil temptations that Ben succumbs to, with the boy setting out to get back at those whom he perceives to have wronged him. Some of his most grisly acts include telepathically breaking someone’s leg and controlling others to commit outright murder on his behalf. There’s certainly a cold logic to Ben’s motivations, but as the narrative begins to pivot around the kid’s violent streak and Ida trying not to be among the rising body count, The Innocents adopts a slasher-esque vibe that, however airlessly aestheticized, feels lurid for the sake of being lurid.

The numerous sequences of violence may make one wish that Vogt had at least focused a little more on the harmless side of the children’s powers, like how they use their abilities to help others or wile away their youthful days. Maybe then it might have felt as if The Innocents weren’t simply and monotonously delighting in watching children demonstrate their capacity for evil. But as it stands, the film is so cynical and relentlessly bleak that it mostly succeeds at conveying a near-total indifference to the complexities of childhood experience.