Casual cruelty and playful perversion make up the slow-burning scares of writer-director Eskil Vogt’s sophomore feature, The Innocents (De uskyldige), whose child characters convey a creepy conception of ethical sentiment. Privileged protagonist Ida (excellent as her young co-stars: Rakel Lenora Fløttum) vents her frustration about her parents’ move to a bare concrete complex by torturing her autistic sister Anna (Alva Brynsmo Ramstad) and engaging in animal abuse. Rapidly escalating, the agony the little girl and her new friend Ben (Sam Ashraf) inflict first upon insects and invertebrates, then a trustful cat, unmasks the inhumane impulses central to the menacing morality lesson offered up by this film.
Spontaneous sadism creates an immediate bond between Ida and Ben. Meanwhile, Anna forms a friendship with gentle neighborhood girl Aisha (Mina Yasmin Bremseth Asheim). As the quartet discovers they possess varying telekinetic abilities, goofing around gives way to portentous power play. Here the plot reveals its distinctive deviation from the movies it draws on: Jack Clayton’s adaptation of Henry James’ Turn of the Screw (also called The Innocents), Firestarter, Village of the Damned and the Twilight Zone classic “It’s a Good Life.” The latter’s childlike monster, Anthony Fremont, is like a counterpart to Ben, who becomes a deadly danger – and not only to his female friends.
Almighty Anthony with his picture perfect US-American, white, middle-class, small-town family became the epitome of toxic male WASP dominance. Ben, however, the ethnic kid of a slightly neglectful, less well-off single mother, turns into an undersized embodiment of bourgeoise white paranoia about dark-skinned males from sketchy backgrounds, supposedly threatening the innocence of blond, blue-eyed girls like Ida and Anna. Their parents (Ellen Dorrit Pedersen, Morten Svartveit) are notably presented as the only intact family. Also raised by an ethnic single mother, Aisha is seen looking sadly at a photo of her absent father.
Aisha’s girlishness and her father’s whiteness – which the film points out – make Aisha less of a disruptive danger than Ben. While Ida is able to learn that non-verbal individuals feel pain, Ben is outright declared unreformable. He is the one leading Ida into the nearby forest associated with brutish instincts and killing Aisha as she opposes his telekinetic terror, something he succeeds in because Aisha’s mother was “all alone.” Cleverly concealed in unobtrusive visual and verbal cues, the socio-psychological subtext is substantiated by the director’s comments: children are born without empathy, the development of which was all up to their parents.
Vogt’s archaic views make the kid’s actions seem less an issue of psychopathological predispositions than proper parenting. The second is the prerogative of the sole traditional white couple. While artistically accomplished, the supernatural thriller implies that families not fitting into a traditionalist, nationalist image are less capable of raising their children. Just like the serene suburban setting harbors volatile violence, the mesmerizing mise-en-scène feeds into problematic presumptions. Paradoxically, those questionable concepts only corroborate the unsettling conclusion of the deeply ambivalent tale about the proximity of tranquility and terror: Even the most innocuous veneer may hide corruption.
- OT: De uskyldige
- Director: Eskil Vogt
- Screenplay: Eskil Vogt
- Country: Norway
- Year: 2021
- Running Time: 117 min.
- Cast: Rakel Lenora Fløttum, Alva Brynsmo Ramstad, Sam Ashraf, Mina Yasmin Bremseth Asheim, Ellen Dorrit Petersen, Morten Svartveit, Mina Yasmin Bremseth Asheim, Lisa Tønne, Irina Eidsvold Tøien, Marius Kolbenstvedt, Kim Atle Hansen, Irina Eidsvold Tøien, Marius Kolbenstvedt, Georg Grøttjord-Glenne
- Release date (US/GER): 13.04.2022/14.04.2022
- Image © Capelight Pictures
Lida Bach is a professional movie journalist and critic from Berlin, having been published and publishing in numerous online media. She has also written for Horror Homeroom on “10 Classic Films to Unlock the Uncanny” and “Us and the Horror of the Class System,” “Lockdown Horror,” and “Falling into the Ethical Abyss of The Platform.” You can check out her website, Cinemagicon, and find her on Twitter.
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