The Big Picture

2021’s
The Innocents
portrays children with supernatural powers making unethical decisions, highlighting the struggle of morality in youth.
The film explores the concept of children acting autonomously, emphasizing the complexity of early moral development and the consequences of selfishness.
Both the classic and modern versions of
The Innocents
delve into the challenges of growing up, with the latter providing a terrifying portrayal of the damage children can inflict.

Horror has always been a genre used to discuss social issues or the often silenced struggles of everyday life. The best pieces of this medium can portray guttural, realistic fears; many creators use this terror to tell resonant stories that many viewers may be shocked to find they relate to. The 1961 horror classic, The Innocents, directed by Jack Clayton, is a horror-drama that does this, using its tale of a young governess faced with two oddly malicious children to broadcast a subversive image of children and the impact adults can have on them. It’s a moving tale featuring sublime acting and topics that its audience had never before encountered onscreen. Yet its allegory for youth, and the terrors that come with it, refuses to really push social norms by focusing on children fully autonomous in their decisions. It has a great beginning to telling an essential message, but it falters in its ability to commit to its own concept. Luckily, the 2021 film that shares its name doesn’t have that issue.

The Innocents During the bright Nordic summer, a group of children reveal their dark and mysterious powers when the adults aren’t looking. In this original and gripping supernatural thriller, playtime takes a dangerous turn.

What Is ‘The Innocents’?
While the two are wildly different, a watch of both reveals that 2021’s The Innocents shares some core themes with the 1961 film of the same name. The ’60s classic focuses on Miss Giddins (Deborah Kerr), a young governess tasked with caring for a young brother and sister in a lonely manor isolated from the outside world. She quickly discovers that something is wrong with them, especially the adolescent Miles (Martin Stephens), who has been expelled from his school for inappropriate behavior. The reveal that they were both deeply influenced by their previous adult caretakers sets up a perfect allegory for the cycle of abuse and the learned behaviors children in unsafe settings can unknowingly perpetuate. Miles learns to act horribly at a formative time in his life, and the movie shows how deeply troubled a child who was taught terrible lessons about the world around him can be. Unfortunately, the film’s ending implies that all of this behavior was because the children were possessed by said previous caretakers; while still a compelling allegory, this lack of agency cheapens the actions by assuaging audience concerns about whether a kid could act like this — because, unfortunately, they can.

Childhood is filled with pivotal moments, particularly learning morality and identifying what you should and shouldn’t do to those around you. While the classic version touches upon this concept but fails to embrace it fully, 2021’s The Innocents, directed by Eskil Vogt, showcases this complicated concept completely — with a twist. It adds superpowers into the mix, having its young cast of characters imbued with unexplained abilities that are unfortunately used in terrifying ways as they work to discover what they should and should not do to those around them.

The film clarifies that despite the supernatural elements, the children act entirely on their own accord and should be viewed as fully aware individuals. Their early development may be the reason for some of their actions, but that’s precisely the point; as a kid, you’re often unaware of the good and bad of your actions, and your ability to ignore intrusive thoughts may be stunted because life hasn’t fully guided you to be a compassionate and fair person. The movie portrays the childhood path to morality in an uncomfortable and nasty way so many watchers can relate to. Still, with the inclusion of powers and one particularly disturbed little boy, this awkwardness quickly becomes horrific.

Subversion Is Always Scary, But Never Like This

2021’s The Innocents is a gripping, complex story, and the creators are lucky they had such a fantastic cast of child actors to help carry it. Following sisters Ida (Rakel Lenora Fløttum) and Anna (Alva Brynsmo Ramstad), who have just moved into a new apartment complex, it follows them as they make friends with neighbors Ben (Sam Ashraf) and Aisha (Mina Yasmin Bremseth Asheim) who have psychic abilities. Even before the powers are introduced, the movie shows that it’s unafraid to portray its children in a sickeningly realistic light; the lonesome Ida is cruel to her nonverbal sister with autism, loathing that she has to take care of her and hurting her in small ways like pinching her or even putting glass in her shoes, knowing Anna can’t tell anyone. This perfectly exemplifies one of the movie’s core messages: kids are often (unintentionally or not) incredibly selfish creatures. All of these children are driven by pure impulse at this point in their lives, and with the adults around them not keeping a close watch, they haven’t been told what they’re doing is wrong. The film’s beginning sees Anna bond with the kindly Aisha while Ida becomes fast friends with Ben, a similarly selfish character who, with his abilities, takes this mentality to a truly sickening level.

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The gore in this movie is petrifying but always has a purpose. The plot sees Ben use his powers to snap people’s legs, send a frying pan into his own mother’s skull, or, in one of the film’s most sickening moments,force Aisha’s mom to stab her own daughter to death.These scenes are extremely difficult to watch, not only because of what’s occurring but also knowing that this is all because of a little boy who didn’t get what he wanted. His unrestrained rage and selfishness causes Ida to finally learn morality and recognize that the anger she held against the world around her was a petty and violent feeling. This lesson comes at a steep cost, though, having to watch both a friend die and her sister become scarred from one of Ben’s attacks cements for the young girl just how terrible her previous thoughts on the world around her were. Learning morality can be tricky, forcing children — even with their slight grasp on the world around them — to reckon with newfound guilt over their actions. Ida indeed does this by the end of the film, but her finally understanding that Ben’s way of thinking is wrong comes at much too high a cost.

‘The Innocents’ Uses Its Camerawork To Emphasize Its Complex Themes
Image via IFC Films

Like the original film, 2021’s The Innocents relies heavily on its cinematography to place the viewer in the perspective of a child. Cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grøvlen alternates between tight close-ups and expansive wide shots that not only make The Innocents truly a marvel to look at — it also emphasizes how vast the world is from a child’s perspective. The sweeping wide shots are certainly beautiful, but they also leave you with a sense of uneasiness, the same way a child feels so small and uncertain in a world that seems to care so little about them.

Grøvlen’s stunning camera work makes the viewing experience of The Innocents as hypnotic as it is claustrophobic. The close-up shots of the children ramp up the overall feeling of dread that saturates the film. The Innocents is not shy about showcasing children in a terrifying light, and its use of tight shots of its child actors forces its viewers to confront an uncomfortable, even sickening reality: These kids are not only not alright, they’re downright cruel. It’s a hard, even horrific pill to swallow, but that’s exactly the point the film is trying to make.

‘The Innocents’ Shows That Not Everybody Is

Whether you’re watching the classic or the modern version, any viewing of The Innocents will have audiences thinking about what it truly means to “grow up.” But while the older film touches on this, the modern take on children misbehaving showcases a frightening, super-powered portrayal of how much damage kids can inflict. This is not to say it paints all children in a negative light, as Aisha and Anna represent young people who are kind and empathetic. Ida’s experience throughout the film reveals just how tumultuous growing up can be, how much of childhood is spent doing things you will one day regret and how it’s through that inevitable shame that people learn empathy for others. The film stresses this with some of the most disturbing scenes of horror the genre has ever experienced. In giving one of cinema’s most evil (yet oddly understandable) children literal unchecked power, it opens the door not only for a perfect showcase of its allegory but for horrible atrocities to be enacted against children, by children. A perfect subversion on so many topics and concepts, 2021’s The Innocents portrays the struggles of youth through a genuinely terrifying — but (perhaps too) effective — lens.

The Innocents is available to stream on Shudder in the U.S.

Watch on Shudder