Director: Eskil Vogt
Starring: Rakel Lenora Fløttum, Alva Brynsmo Ramstad, Sam Ashraf, Mina Yasmin Bremseth Asheim.
Country of Origin: Norway
The drab suburban surroundings of a nondescript Norwegian apartment complex mask a telepathic vortex of vulnerable young minds.
Nine-year-old Ida (Rakel Lenora Fløttum) and her older sister Anna (Alva Brynsmo Ramstad) move to a new house with their parents during the summer holidays. Anna has learning difficulties and has not spoken since the age of four. Their relationship is strained. Acts of cruelty foreshadow the unspoken chaos which follows. Ida twists her sibling’s skin, puts broken glass in her shoes and claps in her face. Anna shows no outward emotion. The area is deserted during the vacation period and the few children that remain ignore Ida.
Enter Ben (Sam Ashraf), a seemingly friendly boy who can shift objects using otherworldly special powers. Ida’s face lights up when he magically propels a bottle cap through the air without touching it. Yet he soon exhibits a darker side, dropping a cat down several floors in a stairwell before eventually killing it. The only other youngster who doesn’t blank the sisters is Aisha (Mina Yasmin Bremseth Asheim), a girl who miraculously connects with Anna in unimaginable ways.
Ben’s behaviour veers into dangerous territory as he follows a pathway which leads to a disturbing psychological showdown. The rest is up to you to discover as the supernatural engulfs the humdrum in a film permeated by vagueness and misdirection.
There is no time period, motive for the abhorrent acts perpetrated or any real sense of the internal games constructed inside the brains of easily influenced pre-adolescents. Uncertainty takes us in its grasp and refuses to relent as a menacing swirl of foreboding accompanies every power play in a game of mental one-upmanship.
Not everything is spelled out as the line between reality and imagination frequently disappears. It’s a small aside, but Ida does wear a Liverpool away shirt from the mid-1980s so either director Eskil Vogt is a big fan of the English club or some kind of unlikely retro fashionista.
Regardless you certainly wouldn’t want to get into a staring contest with any of these kids. The blank exchanges without dialogue do become repetitive as the plot crawls along in a running time of nearly two hours. However, it would be wrong to take anything away from an extraordinary young multi-ethnic cast (a point barely worth mentioning but refreshing nonetheless). Rakel Lenora Fløttum plays Ida with just the right amount of wide-eyed curiosity, frustration and wonder.
While Alva Brynsmo Ramstad is staggeringly good and wholly plausible as a girl with developmental challenges in a landscape of countless barriers and unpardonable mocking.
Although most audiences are anaesthetized to even the most depraved things on screen there is still something shocking about children committing violent deeds. Whether necessary or warranted the more gruesome sequences are chillingly effective if nothing else.
It would be easy to make tenuous thematic and geographic links between The Innocents and Swedish horror Let the Right One In (2008), which also features young, troubled protagonists.
While they could conceivably be distant cousins, Vogt’s film stands alone as a masterful play on the power of the voiceless when the unthinkable infiltrates the ordinary.
Stephen Kasiewicz 