Children can be cruel.

This is not new, it is a popular motif in horror films.

Children are an ideal vehicle for evil: victims who become perpetrators.

In "The Innocents" things start relatively harmlessly.

Nine-year-old Ida secretly pinches her older sister Anna.

Anna is autistic, she cannot articulate herself.

Peter Korte

Editor in the feuilleton of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper in Berlin.

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The family has moved to a high-rise settlement on the edge of the forest.

Ida meets a boy of the same age who has telekinetic abilities.

They throw a cat down the stairwell from the top floor, the boy then kicks the animal, which is still twitching weakly, breaking its neck.

By then, at the latest, it had become a certainty that things would get worse.

Eskil Vogt, who wrote the screenplays for Joachim Trier (recently Oscar nominee with “The Worst Man in the World”) and directed “Blind”, doesn't need any crude signals for these hunches.

He slowly and thoroughly designs a world within the world.

The children keep to themselves, there is hardly any interaction with the adults.

The settlement is also a cosmos in itself: no town, no trades nearby, you never see anyone working here.

Vogt's most effective tool, however, is the sound design by Gustaf Berger and Gisle Tveito, which encompasses all the subtle registers of the threatening that never gets shrill or relies on shock effects.

Cruel Children

It's as if the noises and sounds seeped in imperceptibly, often reaching you only half-consciously.

Some elements belonging to the horror genre are simply left out.

Nothing is explained in Vogt's scenario.

There is no place, no object, no dark family legacy, no dark force that lends any meaning to the children's abilities and to what is happening.

The children discover what they are capable of, they become amazed and aware of it.

The film needs correspondingly few visual effects.

A stone that does not fall perpendicularly to the ground, a stream from the faucet that is deflected to the side by a snap of the fingers.

The boy rolls his eyes, his gaze becomes fixed, Anna and Aisha, who says she understands what the autistic girl is saying, seem like sleepwalkers.

And even Ida, who is watching, who has none of the occult abilities, whose actions obey the laws of physics, has an uneasy look.

Telekinetic and telepathic abilities also include a kind of remote hypnosis: the boy can make people do something he wants.

These forces are like dangerous toys.

They lead the children across moral boundaries that they are familiar with at their age.

Because they know what they are doing

"The Innocents" is therefore also an ambiguous title.

They know they do things that no one does.

At the same time, they are not old enough to appreciate the consequences of their actions.

They act like it's all just a dangerous game - and when they have to go home for dinner, it turns out that it all happened in a fantasy world.

The adults are extras in the film.

Two single mothers who don't get much shape, the absent fathers aren't even mentioned.

Although Anna and Ida's parents take care of them, they also let a lot go.

Guiltily, the mother once says that she is asking too much of Ida to look after her older sister.

When the first terrible consequences become visible, they don't even suspect that their children have something to do with it.

Eskil Vogt lets it come to an unusual showdown because it's part of the genre.

But the film has no educational or social message, nor does it have a resolution.

He brings out the uncanniness that lies in the actions of these children.

It lasts quite a long time.