The Innocents Review

Scare Value Award Winner – Best Picture

Top 10 film of 2022

The Innocents review.

The Innocents is a tough watch. It is a dark, brutal movie. It’s also a very good one. An unflinching look at evil, and good, through the eyes and actions of children.

New movie reviews will not contain spoilers.

The Innocents

Directed by Eskil Vogt

Written by Eskil Vogt

Starring Rakel Lenora Fløttum, Alva Brynsmo Ramstad, Sam Ashraf and Mina Yasmin Bremseth Asheim

The Innocents Review

We’ve seen variations of The Bad Seed movie many times. Traditionally played with dark humor for devilish fun. The Innocents does away with any lightness in its depiction of the evil child trope. Despite housing a supernatural bent, The Innocents chooses frightening realism to unnerve and unsettle. This is a movie that will stay with you for a long time.

Four children discover they have supernatural abilities while hanging out over the summer. Ida (Fløttum)and her autistic sister Anna (Ramstad) befriend Aisha (Asheim) and Ben (Ashraf). They play in the woods away from their parents’ view. Things turn deadly when not all the kids play nice.

You could view The Innocents as a superhero/supervillain origin story. It certainly builds like one. If you look at the movie through this lens it might be easier to swallow some of the horrific actions that take place. The movie doesn’t want to make it easy on you. It is set in a realistic world not the heightened world of a comic book plane. The actions are performed by children not mustache twirling villains hell bent on world domination.

What The Innocents is interested in doing is confronting us with a difficult question. There is a clear-cut bad apple in the bunch. Ben does such horrific things in this movie that there is no defending them. There is no excusing him for being a child. No forgiveness is asked for. None is given.

Early in The Innocents there is a scene that inverts the “save the cat” moment traditionally done to make a character likable to the viewer. Ben drops a cat down the stairwell of his apartment complex…landing with a thud several floors below. We see the cat limp away as Ben, with Ida in tow, tracks it down. Ben then steps on the cat’s neck, killing it against Ida’s plea. It’s a horrific sequence.

Ida is the most interesting character. In a very simple sense…she literally fails to “save the cat” here. That’s not an accident. Ida does her own horrible things early in The Innocents. She torments her sister Anna, who is unable to tell anyone that it’s happening. She puts broken glass into her shoe and watches Anna walk around all day, glass cutting into her foot while no one knows any better.

Ben inevitably turns his eye to hurting humans. This puts Ida into an uncomfortable role on the side we root for. Uncomfortable for us. Should Ida be forgiven? Is her thoughtful malice towards her sister excusable due to her youth? Would a genuine display of regret show personal growth? Is it too late? These are the hard questions The Innocents asks while presenting us with a growing threat from Ben and his abilities.

Ben can move things with his mind. He discovers he can also control people. His evil unleashed from the comfort of his living room. The people closest to you become the most immediate threat. There are truly tragic scenes in The Innocents. As you’d imagine from a movie that tortures a cat in the first act…nothing is off limits as the story moves forward.

The group’s burgeoning abilities do have a positive effect on Anna. She can speak a little with the help of her psychic connection to Aisha. Aisha can understand Anna where no one else can and is able to help her be understood by others. It provides some wonderful, emotional scenes to break up what is a dark movie. Anna’s would be the hero origin story through that comic book lens we talked about.

The stakes are high in The Innocents. The young cast does an exceptional job telling a difficult story. The line between forgivable and unforgivable acts is a fine one. Fløttum and Ramstad excel in their tough lead roles. As the story ramps up and the danger comes closer, both of their characters meet the challenge by becoming increasingly interesting. We may not wish to follow Ida but her journey, and the questions that confront you, are what make The Innocents one of the best, and hardest, movies of the year.

Scare Value

The Innocents pulls no punches in its depiction of evil. There are unforgivable acts here. The central question of The Innocents is whether they should be forgiven because they were performed by children. The review of The Innocents thinks it comes to the correct conclusion. It doesn’t come by it easily.

4.5/5