Movie Reviews: The Innocents (2021)

The Innocents (2021)

intro

Ida的恶从踩死一条蚯蚓开始，Ben的恶从高楼扔下一只猫咪开始。两人能成为玩伴，也是对方某种黑暗介质与自己相通，而吸引。

失语的Ida姐姐Anna与Aisha有心灵感应。Ben通过意识进入别人的大脑，控制沸腾的锅子砸倒烫伤自己的母亲且不管不顾，控制陌生人杀害小镇上的青少年，控制Aisha妈妈拿刀杀害自己的孩子。最后Ida集结小镇上其他的通灵者，停止了Ben的心跳。

Ida的画板可以不断抹去她胡乱留下的记号，漫无目的的乱涂和无意义的低语背后，是否隐藏某种玄机？

到底谁是无辜者，被无故杀害的，无法控制自己恶念的，还是新一轮的存活者？

rottentomatoes.com

theguardian.com

Peter Bradshaw Wed 18 May 2022 11.00 BST

The Innocents review – Peter Bradshaw icily brilliant tale of kids with supernatural powers is future classic

Young actors steal the show in this scary movie set on a Norwegian housing estate, where grownups are unaware of the children’s abilities

Norwegian housing estate becomes the village of the damned in this icily brilliant supernatural tale from film-maker Eskil Vogt, who as a screenwriter is known for his collaborations with Joachim Trier; rather amazingly, his movie before this brutal chiller was their co-scripted romantic comedy The Worst Person in the World. As for The Innocents, it might yet become a scary-movie classic: it greased my palms with anxiety and incidentally has some of the best child acting I have ever seen. See it now before Hollywood comes along and messes up your perception with a dodgy remake. (Having said which, Steven Spielberg or Brian De Palma might well have been interested in this script in their younger days, or maybe even now.)

Vogt places us in a pleasant, if featureless residential development in Romsås, Oslo, with 60s-style high-rise buildings near an artificial lake and picturesque woodland. Ida (played by newcomer Rakel Lenora Fløttum) is a moody nine-year-old who resents her mum and dad paying so much attention to her elder sister Anna (Alva Brynsmo Ramstad), who is autistic. As the long hot summer drags on, Ida is left to play outside, and tasked with looking after Anna. But Ida leaves her sister alone on the swings one day while she goes off with a new friend: a boy called Ben (Sam Ashraf) who shows her a strange mental trick he can do, making a bottle cap fly through the air without touching it. He also has a nasty predilection for torturing animals.

Meanwhile, Anna strikes up a friendship with a girl called Aisha (Mina Yasmin Bremseth Asheim), who has telepathic powers to match Ben’s telekinesis. Aisha starts silently communicating in her mind with Anna, who – to her parents’ overjoyed astonishment – is now able to speak, thanks to her new friend. But these superpowers, revealed as calmly and frankly as if in some social-realist drama, become forces for evil.

There is something compelling and even shocking about Ida’s first reaction to Ben’s bottle-cap trick: her sudden, fierce grin of pleasure and excitement. It is almost unearthly. These children are not innocent, and yet there is something pristine in their seclusion from adulthood; like the children in this film’s namesake from 1961, based on Henry James’s ghost story The Turn of the Screw, their world is a secret from the grownups. I also found myself thinking of English TV dramatist Dennis Potter.

With a story such as this, it is tempting to find it legible only as metaphor: to decide that Ida, Anna, Ben and Aisha’s existence is a parable for abuse, family dysfunction or racism (it is the two young people of colour who have the powers, at least initially.) Vogt’s script for Trier’s 2017 film Thelma, with its telekinesis theme, is obviously amenable to metaphorical readings. But perhaps this film’s force comes from the fact that there is no other level to find in it. They simply have these supernatural abilities, it is something to do with their being children, and that is all there is to it. The final “duel” scene, taking place in almost complete silence and under the nose of the notionally competent adults, is a masterpiece of sorts. The Innocents is a nightmare unfolding in cold, clear daylight.

The Innocents is released on 20 May in cinemas and on digital platforms.

thenewyorker.com

By Troy Patterson August 23, 2018

“The Innocents,” Reviewed: Teen Lovers on the Run in a Young-Adult “Westworld”

Like its Netflix neighbor “The End of the F***ing World,” “The Innocents” follows teen lovers on the run in Great Britain. “World” is a punchy dark comedy, with episodes running about twenty minutes, while “Innocents” is a supernatural romance, slick but sincere, with a prestige-TV gloss and a pop sensibility. A typical installment takes twice as much time to evoke youthful turmoil and set up the action scenes (car chases, foot races, fantastical transmutations), which accessorize its melancholy with thrills.

Opening on one of its panting pursuits, the series perpetrates a literal cliffhanger within its first ninety seconds. One bearded man runs after another up rocky hills, past moss and pine, to a bluff above a steel-gray river. The pursuer (Guy Pearce, hardily costumed in a field coat closed by dramatic toggles) snatches the pursued (Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson, who initially resembles a distraught Barbour-catalogue model) away from the edge. The setting is remotest Norway, where glaciers carved high drama into the landscape and also seem to influence the pace. In the speed of its plot, which features achronological curlicues, sulky repetitions, and dilatory musing on questions of selfhood, “The Innocents” occasionally suggests a young-adult “Westworld.”

Looking in on a quasi-medical interrogation room, we begin to catch on that Pearce’s character is a mad scientist, named Halvorson, who tinkers with destiny by experimenting on shape-shifters. His subjects are women who, with a bit of rigorous neck-stretching and some understated C.G.I. work, mutate into duplicates of people they’ve touched. The man he tackled on the bluff was, in fact, a woman, who had helplessly transformed into the double of his chief accomplice, Steinar. Halvorson’s objectives are ethically dubious, but his rimless eyeglasses are splendid.

Another of his subjects is the mother of the protagonist, June McDaniel (Sorcha Groundsell). We encounter June, a doe-eyed English schoolgirl, on the cusp of her sixteenth birthday. It’s been three years since Mum split, and June’s stern father plans to move the family to a distant island, the better to satisfy his inclinations as a military transport aircraft among helicopter parents. June and her clandestine boyfriend, Harry (Percelle Ascott), plan to run away and start afresh. Scarcely has the girl slid out the window when Steinar, promising a reunion with her mother, attempts to hustle her into the back of a van. The lovers escape, but June later shifts into his shape.

In a less stable relationship, this would be a deal-breaker. Indeed, the second episode begins with another chase: Harry is fleeing June, now played by Jóhannesson, who struggles to persuade him that she is herself. In their motel room, they huddle in front of a mirror, which reflects a shifter’s true identity. In time, June grows calm and gets back to her old self. Renewing their trust and resuming their flight, the lovers head to London, where June receives mentorship from one well-adjusted, self-controlled shifter, who explains their superhuman condition with reference to Old Norse mythology. Oh, why not? you think, having come far enough to see that “The Innocents” inhabits a level of fantasy where fabulous schlock and comic-book cliché are indispensable. I was still wondering whether it would be viable to describe June’s powers in terms of a hackneyed conundrum—is it a gift or a curse?—when her mother had cause to roar, “It’s not a gift. It’s a curse!”

When the action takes us to Norway, where pearlescent clouds conjure the sullenness of Scandinavian noir, “The Innocents” tends to grow maddeningly stagnant, as if the show had built in longueurs for the convenience of viewers itching to divert their attention to other screens. In England, where Harry and June find time for soul-searching chats on casual strolls while fleeing both Steinar and their parents, its easy tempo feels more purposeful. The series, created by Hania Elkington and Simon Duric, exults in lingering among the dreams and fears typical of coming-of-age tumult. It is standard for young people to imagine that one’s parents are Greek gods or pure-blood wizards, and more common yet for them to react with distress as their bodies change. Sulking thoughtfully, the show gathers durable themes of juvenile fantasy into an attractive package. Harry encourages June to escape with him into adulthood by saying, “Now we can be whoever we want to be.” The irony is garish: June can be anyone, but in a way that no one would want, in this fanciful evocation of adolescent moods and problematic magic.

thenewyorktimes.com

By Jeannette Catsoulis Published May 12, 2022Updated May 13, 2022

‘The Innocents’ Review: Head Games

Four children develop unusual abilities in this wonderfully eerie Norwegian horror movie.

“The Innocents” may share a title — and even some thematic fragments — with Jack Clayton’s 1961 ghost story, but its vibe is ultimately more superheroic than spectral. There’s no hint of either characteristic, though, in the movie’s gorgeous opening shot of an angelically sleeping child, the brush of eyelashes on freckled skin glowing in summer sunlight. The child is 9-year-old Ida (Rakel Lenora Flottum), and when she wakes and carefully pinches the thigh of her autistic, nonverbal sister, Anna (played by the neurotypical actor Alva Brynsmo Ramstad), we know Ida is no angel.

Yet “The Innocents,” written and directed by Eskil Vogt (probably best known for his collaborations with Joachim Trier), isn’t concerned with adjudicating right and wrong. Rather, this uncannily atmospheric movie immerses us in a childhood world where choices between cruelty and kindness, empathy and hostility must be learned and negotiated. Set in a large Norwegian housing complex, where towering apartment blocks huddle before an encroaching forest, the story pulls Ida and Anna toward two other children: Aisha (Mina Yasmin Bremseth Asheim), sweet and gentle, and the slightly older Ben (Sam Ashraf), moody and intense. Both live with single mothers; but while Aisha’s is lovingly attentive, Ben’s is neglectful, unaware that her bullied son is becoming dangerously angry. And that he has paranormal gifts.

Those aptitudes — telepathy, telekinesis and a terrifying ability to control minds — are amplified when Ben is around the other children, who begin to share some of them. Thoughts move unhindered from one brain to another, and an injury to one child causes another to bleed. At first, Ben’s tricks with rocks and bottle caps seem innocent enough, no more worrying than Ida’s double-jointed elbows; but when, in a series of increasingly horrifying scenes, his playfulness lurches into sadism, Ida is the first to recognize that they may all be in danger.

Skillfully merging menace and sweetness (when Anna begins to speak, her parents’ delight is incredibly touching), “The Innocents” constructs a superbly eerie moral landscape, one that the children (all of whom are fantastic) must learn to navigate. Keeping the light bright and the camera mostly at child height, the cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grovlen fills his sunny, soaring final shot with chilly foreboding. Ida and Anna, knowing no adult can help them, can only try to save themselves.