From Boston Underground Film Festival: ‘The Innocents (De Uskyldige)’ Review

From its first moments, Eskil Vogt’s supernatural horror thriller “The Innocents” introduces its gravity-defying world as seen through the eyes of a child. It opens on a lingering shot of Ida (Rakel Lenora Fløttum) half-asleep in a car, her face moving in and out of dusty sunlight, calm but slightly uneasy in a moment of unexplained transition. The scene may serve to remind viewers of their own drowsy childhood car rides home, when time seemed to stretch out around them and conversations in the front seat faded into a background drone. The movie — which focuses on a group of children growing up in a suburban apartment complex whose parents remain distant figures with unseen, unspecified problems — embraces and explores this kind of backseat obliviousness throughout its runtime.

The film, which had its East Coast premiere on Mar. 24 as part of the Boston Underground Film Festival, establishes its atmosphere of uncertain dread in these early moments, carrying it through to the finale. When the audience later learns that Ida was driving with her family (including her older sister Anna (Alva Brynsmo Ramstad), who has non-speaking autism) to their new apartment in a remote apartment block, the unease in the air suddenly makes sense, as Ida doesn’t fully understand the implications of her family’s move but senses her life changing. The film explores and weaponizes this uncertainty through its supernatural coming-of-age story, which unfolds in an atmosphere both blurred by childhood naivete and heightened by youthful imagination. In some places, though, the film overly simplifies real-world issues that deserve to be more carefully and sensitively treated onscreen, in particular the film’s portrayal of autism and a supernatural “cure.”

The film’s horror premise is simple but disastrous, like a pared-down, Scandinavian Stephen King setup unfolding in the woods of Norway rather than Maine. Ida’s first friend in the neighborhood is an earnest young boy, Ben (Sam Ashraf), who shows her a party trick he’s working on: he can “slingshot” rocks across a forest clearing without touching them (meaning, as the kids slowly realize, he is capable of telekinesis.) As he demonstrates the trick to Ida in a bright, sun-splashed clearing in the woods, Vogt focuses on close-ups of their delighted reactions and mundane curiosity, only widening the frame near the end of the scene to reveal that Ben is telekinetically moving objects. In this way, Vogt shows how the kids see this feat of startling magic as an amusement rather than the inevitable source of future issues that the audience understands it to be. The film tracks their realization that Ben and Anna’s eventual relationship may be more dangerous than they knew.

The film is most successful in its visual language, drawing tension and resonance from skillful cinematography, editing, and production design. Vogt makes remarkable use of natural light, reminiscent of Ari Aster’s style. The lush forest is splashed with sunlight, glowing off the screen while the playground and man-made beach by the apartments are dull and sun-bleached. The viewer glimpses these two worlds as seen by the children, appreciating the woods’ undisturbed nature and recoiling from the concrete common spaces. By the end of the film, Vogt has built up the apartment complex as its own character, standing against the free and lighthearted possibility of nature. In dramatic dream sequences it’s foreboding, swathed in fog and abandoned, but even in everyday moments the interior spaces come across as gloomy and vacant, conveying the children’s emotional distance from their parents.

As the film progresses, Vogt effectively channels the naive perspectives of his protagonists while also gesturing to the obvious problems on the horizon and ratcheting up tension. He makes viewers hope for the best but expect the worst. The film’s straightforward supernatural arc becomes viscerally affecting through carefully-placed, choreographed moments of violence or catastrophe that provoked gasps from the audience.

In one memorable early moment, Ben and Ida find a neighborhood cat and drop it from the top of their apartment-tower staircase. The cat is crippled in a stomach-turning fall, and Ben decides they should kill it. When he crushes the kitten’s head, the sound reverberated, sharp and horrific, through the theater. When the kids discover that Anna is telekinetic in Ben’s presence and their neighbor Aisha (Mina Yasmin Bremseth Asheim) is telepathic, they’re excited at the possibility that Anna can communicate with them telepathically.

Though Vogt seems to attempt to float a potentially wholesome progression for the movie wherein the kids band together and communicating in their own way through magic, the focus on Anna gaining speech abilities feels misguided and patronizing. It's eerily reminiscent of the ableist fantasy that autistic people can be “cured” of neurodivergence. Anna’s telepathic speech, and the way it is presented as a solution to her family’s worries, seems to present a negative, inauthentic image of autism as an obstacle to be overcome rather than a widely-varied condition that individuals and families can manage, lead happy lives with, and value as part of their identity.

In interviews about the film, Vogt said he researched autism and spoke with the parents of autistic children, but he does not seem to have consulted with autistic self-advocates or groups, as is becoming an encouraged practice for film & TV projects featuring autistic characters. The film does not give Anna’s character significant agency or depth, reflecting the criticism that film representations of non-verbal characters often center on the people around them and sideline the autistic person in their own story. The film focuses on the other characters’ reactions to Anna’s autism, including her sister’s apparent resentment and even violence (like when she puts broken glass in Anna’s shoes), but rarely questions or challenges those behaviors and instead highlights how Anna could change, presenting a troubling message around autism, neurodivergence, and its manageability.

Notwithstanding this significant issue, the horror-thriller delivers an engaging, vivid, and intense final act, depicting the children’s last stand against a supernatural force that threatens their lives and families. The final effect is bolstered by the film’s excellent sound design, which remains startling, clear, and deliberate; the music is light and sparse, all fluttering strings crashing into thunderous echoes. Moments of violence ring with awful clarity, from the splash of water to the thunk of a brick. Through these moments, Vogt stitches together striking, atmospheric moments of realization and confrontation between the children, bringing the nightmarish saga to an end in a terrifying final sequence with stunning visual effects. Ultimately, though, Vogt was working with a supernatural premise simple enough to potentially feel underwhelming, his deliberate and precise directorial approach culminated in an arresting work of daylight horror.

—Staff writer Harper R. Oreck can be reached at Harper.Oreck@thecrimson.com