A scary and twisted mind.
A family moves into their new home. They have two children, and the oldest of them has autism. The youngest sister meets a boy and a girl, and these four become friends. But there’s something strange going on when they are together, and the boy discovers he has telekinetic powers. In the beginning, it’s all fun and games. But it turns out that the boy is a psycho. So someone needs to stop him, and the autistic girl is the key.
The Innocents is directed by, Eskil Vogt. He has written the scripts for all the movies Joachim Trier has directed. And that is a quality sign right there. He has made one movie before The Innocents, which is Blind (2014). I haven’t watched that movie yet, but it has been on my watchlist for many years.
The Innocents is a movie that focuses on creating tension and an unsettling atmosphere. We follow the four kids, and the universe is small. They live in a big apartment complex, and there’s not much going on there. The movie isolates the characters in the apartments and outside the apartment complex.
If you don’t like movies that burn slowly, and I mean slowly, then you should skip The Innocents. If you like movies where the characters are trapped in a small bubble where they try to figure out what to do without telling the adults, then this is a movie worth watching, if you can handle the slow pacing. This is a kid’s world, but they visit dark places when it turns out that the young boy is a psycho. He doesn’t use his telekinetic powers to make the world better. He’s damaged goods, and he’s lonely and dangerous when he experiments with his telekinetic powers.
The young actors didn’t irritate me, so that’s a big plus. The movie is well shot, and we also get to see some beautiful, but short, visual scenes. I wish we could have seen more of the beautiful visual scenes when things turn ugly, but maybe it had something to do with the budget.
If you have seen Chronicle (2012), It Follows (2014) and Thelma (2017), then this is the kid’s version of those movies. But The Innocents isn’t a movie for young kids. It gets pretty dark, and people die in this movie. Early in the movie, we see a cat get brutally killed by the psycho. So trust me, this isn’t a family movie!