Categories: Reviews

Criticism of ‘The Innocents’, cold Norwegian terror

Eskil Vogt takes us to the resplendent Nordic summer, where a group of children reveal their dark and mysterious powers while the adults don’t look.

    That those two twin brothers in the masterful ‘The Other’ (Robert Mulligan, 1972) whose awakening to adulthood, at the end of innocence, had a lot to do with death, with refined and infantile sadism and connections with the fantastic, they had Nordic roots (a family of Swedish immigrants in a deep America just as magical and terrifying) it was not a coincidence. Nor is it that ‘The Innocents’, evil tale of children as or more abandoned by absent parents, unknown or in another plane of reality than those of François Truffaut’s films, be Danish and that in it that cruel and touching strangeness of films like Let me in or the also author (Danish) of the fantastique, the intangible, death and the miraculous as something possible Carl Theodor Dreyer is recognized. ‘The Innocents’ continues to be Dreyerian no matter how much its look and theme may remind us of dramatic material by Stephen King (‘Carrie’), ‘Scanners’, by David Cronenberg, the television ‘Stranger Things’ of which it would be a kind of very uncomfortable episode, to the novels of Enid Blyton (those kids together on the fringes of everything and everything with the adults as the recurring villains) and even to the mutant imagery of Marvel comics. It is, Dreyerian, because the children in the film search for their souls in a world without God (that desolate block of flats with a park next to it, perhaps the best description of what separates the world of children from that of adults) where the miracle has more to do with the fear of man (let alone a child) than with divine grace.

    ‘The Innocents’, An immersive experience that goes on little by little, in each encounter and in each forbidden game that raises its level of cruelty, it is a cruel film and yet one of fascinating and ethereal beauty (even in its murders).As well as that character who in theory (and in a practice that the group of his former friends will replicate) is the villain and the enemy to beat, another helpless child (another lost and injured Magneto child) who awakens in us more feelings of protection than of rejection.

    For mutant tasters of strange childhoods

    Best: That final showdown at the playground, better than many similar ones from the Marvel movies.

    DATA SHEET

    Address: Eskil Vogt Interpreters: Rakel Lenora Fløttum, Sam Ashraf, Alva Brynsmo Ramstad, Kadra Yusuf Country: Norway Year: 2021 Release date: 30–09-2022 Gender: Terror Script: Eskil Vogt Duration: 117 minutes

    Synopsis: During the resplendent Nordic summer, a group of children reveal their dark and mysterious powers while the adults don’t look.

    Source: Fotogramas