The Innocents
2021 Directed by Eskil Vogt
Halloween Marathon 2024 Day 27 Film 55
This is a twist on the Bad Seed/Village of the damned tropes of supernatural children that are on the verge of understanding their power. Usually it plays on how adults relate to that kind of innocent evil- not knowing whether or not they were simply born that way or if they’ve been a good parent.
In this film however there’s a strong focus on how the troubled beings interact together. A non-supernatural girl, her nonverbal telepathic/telekinetic autistic sister, an empathic girl who is able to understand and emote for the autistic sister, and a troubled boy who is able to to move objects (including people). They each play games on discovering their powers and seemingly the ability to connect is greater with the empath.
As the troubled boy is abused by his mother he starts to hurt animals and eventually turns on doing evil acts through “fetching” other people- seemingly inducing them to fear so they’ll do the evil actions he decides. This question as to his morality pops up- as it seems each person is lonely, but his spark of hateful sadism seems to have trickled from being bullied.
The girls try to fight against his spark of rage, but it’s too late to stop him without help from the other children. They each seem to have some intuition as to his evil, and are able to push back. This made me consider their actions as this supernatural understanding of the world that children have- that anything may be possible and so it is.
There are some problems with how the tale is told- focus less on the family drama, and the pacing could have picked up a little more to help for the final act. As it was there were a lot of frustrating moments with the characters and their inability to communicate to adults around them (requiring some leap of logic), but that’s part of the theme too. What wasn’t as understood was how easily the boy would do his evil deeds- I suppose this felt like adolescent mutated X-Men who don’t fully understand their actions.
It seemed like the intuitive girl’s ability to connect with the other people could have negated his powers somewhat- so from a superhuman powers point of view it felt like a missed opportunity. Aside from that a lot of the acting was just standing with the tele-x powers like they’re in a Dragon Ball Z episode watching each other’s power level. It was mostly well done, but got somewhat repetitive, and could have used some more visually interesting moments
That said the film has interesting elements of learning through those early stages of development- and far better as a creeping horror story for superpowered humans than “The New Mutants.” There’s this sense that this whole world of connecting is something that adults can never tap back into nor fully understand.