Europa Europa Film Festival 2022 Film Review: The Innocents
Image courtesy of Europa Europa 2022.
Take Chronicle, mix it with Village of the Damned, add a splash of Stranger Things, ground it with an almost social realist tone, and what do you get? The Innocents (De uskyldige): a slow-burn supernatural thriller directed by Eskil Vogt (frequent writing collaborator of Joachim Trier, with whom he co-penned the recently Academy Award-nominated Worst Person In The World).
The Innocents focuses on a group of children: the mischievous and sometimes cruel Ida, her autistic and largely non-verbal older sister Anna, Ben, who suffers from domestic abuse, and Aisha, the youngest of the group, as they slowly begin to manifest strange powers over one Norwegian summer. What follows reaffirms my personal desire to never have children, as their naivety and curiosity leads to some incredibly shocking and disturbing acts of cruelty.
The atmosphere throughout the first half is particularly tense, as we feel something insidious bubbling away beneath the surface. Ida constantly tortures her older sister due to her apparent immunity to pain, pinching her and, in a wince-inducing scene, putting broken glass in her shoes. This leads to a sense of dread; if they’re already this awful without any overt supernatural intervention, what comes next? An altercation involving a cat had the audience groaning in discomfort, and despite considering myself more desensitised than most, I’ll admit I forgot about the popcorn sitting next to me for a while after.
Unfortunately, despite the surprisingly decent-to-great child performances (Alva Brynsmo Ramstad as Anna in particular, as I found myself googling whether she was actually on the spectrum afterwards), and some minimal but well-utilised special effects that kept the grounded feel the film was going for, it loses steam as it swerves into decidedly more predictable and less provocative territory. I’m not saying that it needed to be non-stop gut punches of depravity, nor descend into a gorefest, but there were large stretches that felt stagnant. I can appreciate the plot allowing Ida to mature and become less of a monster, and her relationship with Anna ended up rather sweet, but the tension dissipated as a result. After what some of these characters have done, I find myself not caring as the final showdown ends up leading the film out on a whimper.
All in all, The Innocents is interesting and fairly original, if underwhelming, and I can see it being a hit on “ending explained” and “story recap” YouTube channels. This supernatural coming of age chiller has a lot of great ingredients, but the end result is something that could’ve done with a bit more time in the kitchen.
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The Innocents screened as part of the 2022 Europa Europa Film Festival, and is showing in select cinemas from Thursday May 19th. For tickets and more info, click here.