The Innocents [2021]
“I can make people do things…”
Brutal, chilling, brave, and thoughtful; The Innocents is the latest feature film by Eskil Vogt. Recently nominated for “Best Original Screenplay” for his work on The Worst Person in the World, Vogt’s work may finally be gaining the international attention it so desperately deserves. If you have kids… you may want to look at them a little differently after this one. A little more compassionately, a little more hopefully... and a little more frightfully.
The best way for me to sum up The Innocents is “kids on bikes gone bad”. The film is both heavily redolent of 2018’s Freaks and 2017’s Super Dark Times; but manages to not step on the toes or be derivative of either. The Innocents is an impressively brave coming of age story set against the backdrop of a serene Norwegian town. The trees are tall and lush, the water is still and pure, and families play in well maintained and placid playgrounds while the slightly older kids venture through the surrounding woods in search of discovery, mystery, and awe.
There are friends, there are bullies, there are present parents, and there are absent ones. The world set up by The Innocents is at once perfectly believable and comfortable, and horrifyingly close to home when things start to take a turn.
Despite its supernatural premise, The Innocents never feels outlandish or hokey. The proverbial shark plays an important part in the story without ever getting jumped, and you simply can’t tear your eyes away or cease to wonder at the depth of what you’re seeing on screen. The film has nearly a 100% focus on child actors, and each one of them gives a performance on par with any major Hollywood name. It’s difficult to summarize what existing within the world of The Innocents feels like with anything other than the world “real”.
This will not be a film for everyone. It’s raw, it’s harsh, and its unflinching view of the brutality that exists in the world of children, will leave some truly shaken. Kids are loving and sweet and kind and beautiful and wondrous creatures… but kids are also incredibly mean. The world is all new to them, every adventure that begins must end somewhere else fantastical… but they are all exploring that place and those adventures within the scope of their own limited understanding of consequences and without knowing the lasting impact of their actions. The Innocents explores exactly what that narrow scope and loose grasp on “long-term” means when the kids in question have a little more to offer than your typical running, screaming, laughing, fighting 7-year olds.
This being said, The Innocents is also an incredibly beautiful look into that same frightening world that exists between the one that we understand as adults, and the awe-inspiring fantasy realm in which children’s minds wander, grow, and flourish. Children are at once fragile and impressively strong – able to bounce back after the most intense of tragedies or injuries. It’s that same inability to grasp long-term consequences that makes each day’s struggles simply a new adventure to be had. Kids lead their lives one step at a time, understanding that what they did had to be done… and rarely thinking beyond that point. It’s a beautiful perspective and one that The Innocents is ultimately exploring.
What does it mean to be good? What does it mean to care for someone else? What do we do when the people who are supposed to care for us aren’t equipped to do so? Is there ever a time that doing the wrong thing can happen for the right reasons? The Innocents explores these questions with an unusual tact and from a perspective that one would not expect such depth from. The film is intelligent, it is cruel, and it is strangely moving as it intrepidly treks though the complex answers of the simple question:
“Mama? What do you do when someone’s mean?”
