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The Innocents (2021) is surprisingly not a remake of The Innocents (1961). This is because it is not a Hollywood film. It is a Norwegian film. That means everyone associated with it has names that look like they randomly removed vowels and spaces.
For example, The Last Movie Outpost in Norwegian is Thelst Mveotpst.
Let’s take a look at The Innocents. Spoilers will be minimal because it is a decent effort.
The Innocents
The Innocents is brought to you by Eskil Vogt, who wrote and directed. We have Vogts in my neck of the woods here in Midwest, USA. This may explain why we have Norwegian jokes, most notably in the form of Ole and Lena stories. They usually go something like this…
Ole and Lena got married. On their honeymoon trip they were nearing Minneapolis when Ole put his hand on Lena’s knee.
Giggling, Lena said, “Ole, you can go a little farther now if ya vant to!”
So, Ole drove to Duluth…
With The Innocents, Vogt created a film somewhat similar to Chronicle. Remember how happy and charismatic Michael B. Jordan was in Chronicle? Now it seems like he glowers all the time.
The Innocents is similar to Chronicle in that it is basically about kids getting superpowers… sort of… While Chronicle is pure genre entertainment, Vogt goes for something more quiet and highbrow with The Innocents. Another difference is that teenagers are not involved in The Innocents. The kids are more in the ten-year-old bracket.
Setting the film in Norway gives The Innocents a slightly alien feel as the kids go about their lives among brutalist architecture beneath gray skies. The film has an undercurrent of cruelty to it as Vogt refuses to shy away from the fact that kids can be psychopaths sometimes. Whether it is being mean to animals or picking on each other, kids aren’t always the angels they appear.
The Age Of The Innocents
The Innocents takes place in an apartment complex. Ida (Rakel Lenora Fløttum) and her nonverbal autistic sister, Anna (Alva Brynsmo), are new to the building. They befriend another young girl named Aisha (Mina Yasmin Bremseth) and a young boy named Ben (Sam Ashraf).
Ben displays weak telekinetic powers, and Aisha has a form of something that could best be described as empath/telepathy. No explanation is given for these powers, although it appears that the presence of Anna boosts the powers of Ben and Aisha.
All of this is presented without fanfare. The Innocents is the antithesis of a comic book movie, even though it is a comic book movie at its most basic level. Another good comparison would be Unbreakable, but even the moody somnolence of Unbreakable shows a bit more energy.
This is not a knock on The Innocents, however. Vogt does a nice job building up an eerie tone with a highly reserved technique. He coaxes fine performances out of the child actors as one person within the quartet begins a slide into evil. No moustache-twirling exists. The child in question is able to project an unsettling vibe just by looking at someone.
Throughout it all, Vogt maintains emotional investment in the characters as they move toward their restrained showdown. Mrs. Wrenage watched a bit of The Innocents and left the room after a scene made her too sad. In that case, she better not ever watch Uncommon Valor…
Presumed The Innocents
Ultimately, the restraint Vogt uses with The Innocents is both a pro and a con. While one enjoys the mood, one would also like to see more explanation for things. In Chronicle, we at least got a meteorite. Nothing like that is presented in The Innocents.
From this we can conclude that Vogt is probably trying to say something. My interpretation is that the powers represent encroaching adulthood. Friendships in the formative years are special things that often fall apart as maturity makes inroads into the group. One year two kids can sit on a bus fantasizing about building dinosaur robots. A few years later, one of those kids turns into a jock and the other turns into a nerd, and dinosaur robots are no longer enough to bridge the gap.
This is, perhaps, what The Innocents represents. Sometimes the splintering can be worse than simply jumping between levels in the high school hierarchy, however. Sometimes, kids also might take a bad route. Some might fall by the wayside. And some push through the challenges.
The Innocents is not a great film, but it doesn’t miss the cutoff by a wide margin. It is an intriguing look into the darker corners of childhood and the loss of innocence.
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