‘The Innocents’: Eskil Vogt's Latest Is A Violent & Disturbing Nightmare Of Childhood [Cannes Review]

What do we really know about children? Until the Renaissance, artists were still painting them as freakish shriveled adults. Only in the last century-ish did American society decide they probably should go to school instead of laboring all day in sweatshops. And though modernity affords parents all the luxuries of developmental psychology and helicopter parenting, perhaps children still remain more of a mystery than we may think. In “The Innocents,” which debuted in the Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes Film Festival, Norwegian filmmaker Eskil Vogt (Joachim Trier‘s longtime screenwriter, who also directs) posits that we don’t know much about children at all.

A violent nightmare of a film, “The Innocents,” follows a posse of elementary-school-aged children who discover that they have telekinetic powers (which, on the surface, doesn’t sound that different from Trier’s 2017 film, “Thelma,” also written by Vogt, which centered on young adults with inexplicable powers, and the cost of those abilities when they can’t be controlled). New to the neighborhood, Ida (Rakel Lenora Fløttum) and her sister Anna (Alva Brynsmo Ramstad) explore their new home eagerly, though warily; Anna is autistic and nonverbal, and Ida is charged with caring for her when they venture out of the apartment to play, a duty she balks at, hiding shards of broken glass in Anna’s shoe and pinching her hard on the arms. Nevertheless, both sisters quickly make friends—Ida with Benjamin (Sam Ashraf), a seemingly pleasant boy who turns out to be a murderous sociopath, and Anna with Aisha (Mina Yasmin Bremseth Asheim), a sweet girl who can read and verbalize Anna’s inner thoughts. Their friendships start innocuously enough on both axes. Ida delights in watching Ben make stones ricochet sideways with just his mind, while Aisha and Anna create a private world of friendship in the sandbox outside the apartment.

But make no mistake: “The Innocents” is no young adult novel adaptation, and things get very dark very quickly. Ben, in particular, has a more negligent mother than his three compatriots and combined with his natural predilection for cruelty (a gruesome scene with a stray cat named Jabba is practically unwatchable). He uses his powers to become a silent tyrant, exacting revenge on any who cross him. Violent delights have violent ends, and as Ben spirals further into a homicidal rage, the girls must band together in order to stop him from wreaking destruction on their lives.

A speculative fiction that falls down a demented rabbit hole, “The Innocents” features a quartet of impressive performances by child actors, all in service of a story that seems to believe in showing cruelty for cruelty’s sake. What, after all, is the point of all this brutality? From animal abuse to matricide, to stabbing, to stoning, there’s so much of it, and if there’s a message here, its delivery gets lost in the sheer volume of bloodshed. One or two injuries are enough to make the point that kids are pointlessly and casually cruel, but more than that just feels gratuitous, particularly when the victims are so young and so defenseless. That’s the purpose of the film, of course, but it’s neither particularly good nor accurate (are kids really that casually and indifferently evil?), and certainly not worth trotting out the carnival of constant torture that Vogt insists on displaying, ratcheting up the stakes with each additional attack.

To his credit, Vogt constructs an elaborate visual playground that befits the story, one of both urban living spaces and an almost magical forest, both of which the children inhabit with equal wonder. The production design emphasizes height—the children live in a high-rise apartment, in which the cavernous stairwell becomes a pivotal obstacle, while coniferous trees tower almost prehistorically over their play sessions. Vogt’s camera offers the sense of feeling constantly shorter than everything else, a vulnerability that appropriately imitates the particular paranoia of childhood—a stage of life in which stairs, balconies, footbridges, and a slew of other ordinary places take on a patina of danger. Children, Vogt reminds us, are vulnerable to nearly everything, but so is everyone else. “What do you do if someone’s mean?” Ida asks her mother anxiously, and when her mother (Ellen Dorrit Petersen) replies, “Tell a grown-up,” Vogt shows us Ida’s dismay plainly. That’s part of growing up, too, of course, the realization that the orderly system of parental protection is not infallible, that adults are just as susceptible to violence as children and incapable of really protecting them.

But certain adults seem much more competent than others, and herein lies the strange racial subtext of “The Innocents.” Blond-haired Ida and Anna’s mother and father, played respectively by Petersen and Morten Svartveit, are the consummate parents, doting and responsible. On the other hand, Ben’s mother (Lisa Tønne) is implied to be abusive and careless, while Aisha’s mother (Kadra Yusuf) commits a terrible crime, albeit under hypnosis. “Would you and Mommy ever do that to us?” Ida asks her father, to which he stops short and assuages his daughter’s fear by unequivocally denying it, explaining that Aisha’s mother was “sick in the head.” It’s likely not a conscious choice on Vogt’s part to make the only non-white, single parents the irresponsible, tragic ones. But if “The Innocents” tells us anything, it’s that the subconscious is worth exploring, too. [C+]

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