Mark Reviews Movies: THE INNOCENTS (2022)

The Innocents, IFC Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 12, 2022

The Innocents is torn between the severity of its story, which involves children caught up in a seemingly unstoppable cycle violence, and the fantastical quality of its central gimmick. Writer/director Eskil Vogt's movie is about a group of kids who are uncertain about themselves, mostly ignored or neglected by their parents, and unclear about the lines between good and bad, right and wrong, or acceptable and unacceptable actions and behaviors.

There's an oppressively dark tale here, as we watch one child descend from casual cruelty to a more motivated form of it. Meanwhile, his young friends find themselves incapable of doing anything about what this boy has done and likely will do. After all, he was a friend at one point and, like them, is still a kid. Beyond those concerns, what's to stop him from hurting them, if nothing or no one has prevented him until the point they realize something needs to be done?

That's the terrifying part of this premise, but there's another, just as vital, and, in some ways, more important element of this story. These kids may be incapable of figuring out what to do with their troublesome and increasingly malevolent friend, but if they do come up with a plan, they're definitely not impotent. These kids possess supernatural powers.

Those abilities—how they function and how these kids use them—become the primary focus of Vogt's story. In the process, the more thoughtful and frightening aspects here are overshadowed, undermined, and placed within a context that adds a dismissive and distancing effect to them.

Somewhere in Norway, 8-year-old Ida (Rakel Lenora Fløttum) is moving into a new apartment, among a collection of complexes, with the rest of her family. She's a bit upset about this, not only because it will mean a new school and finding new friends, but also because the decision, like so much else involving this family, was made to help Ida's older sister Anna (Alva Brynsmo Ramstad). Anna has autism, and the sisters' parents (played by Ellen Dorrit Petersen and Morten Svartveit) offer more attention to Anna than Ida. The younger daughter resents it.

Ida does make a fast friend in Ben (Sam Ashraf), one of the few kids who remains at the apartment complexes during the summer. We learn that Ben lives alone with his mother (Lisa Tønne), who is rarely home but treats her son with bitterness and a rough hand when she is. Outside of the house, he's bullied by some older kids, and all of this has made Ben angry and aggressive.

In a sequence making that point a bit too blatantly, Ben drops a cat from a stairwell, proceeds to crush the wounded animal's head under his foot, and laughs at what he has done. After that, there's little room for interpretation about the character: He's a little sadist, whatever the reason and motives may be.

That overt simplification feels more in line with the conceit of super-powers here. Ida, Anna, and another girl named Aisha (Mina Yasmin Bremseth Asheim), who has telepathic powers—making her able to communicate with and/or through Anna, although the specifics are vague—and a depressed mother (Kadra Yusuf), see Ben, who learns to move things and control people with his mind, become more and more dangerous. It's the kind of straightforward, throwaway plotting of any given superhero tale, but obviously, Vogt has deeper ideas in mind.

The plot and those ideas clash, then, in ways that become progressively frustrating and unnecessarily troublesome. The frustration is that there is something just beneath the surface of the story of the kids learning about and honing their powers, before coming into conflict with each other.

That, of course, has to do with how these children learn their attitudes and behaviors from the influential absence and/or direct influence of their parents. Both Ida and Ben begin their arcs here with ire and the capability for cruelty (The girl puts broken glass in Anna's shoes), but despite her own problems at home, Aisha shows an immediate capacity for empathy toward Anna—likely because of her own mother's condition. While Ida learns from her friend, Ben rejects the notion, and from there, the plot becomes a pretty routine battle between good and evil.

As for the troubling part of Vogt's approach, it has to do with all of this violence revolving around young children, as a couple of kids are murdered by adults under Ben's influence. While that part of the story feels distasteful for obvious reasons, the whole idea of putting these kids, with these powers, and with this much influence on others within the real world adds an unintended level of responsibility to these children and their actions. They are, in fact, more powerful, more influential, and more responsible than any of the adults in this story. If that's part of Vogt's point as a critique of society, it's also lost as the kids move closer and closer toward a climactic battle.

There's an unsettling depiction of child psychology in the early stages of The Innocents. In theory, the movie attempts to heighten that feeling by way of its supernatural gimmick, but in practice, the gimmick only serves to undercut the movie's real-world concerns.

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