Childhood. For the fortunate it’s a time of innocence and wonder. For others, it is a time of helplessness, isolation and even hurtful rage. The latter is clearly of more interest to Norwegian director Eskil Vogt.

In the world of film, Vogt is best known for writing the 2021 Oscar nominated script for The Worst Person in the World, a dark comedy about millennial indecisiveness. Prior to that, he wrote the supernatural thriller, Thelma, which like Worst Person, was directed by Joachin Trier. Vogt has a fondness for going to dark places and with his sophomore directorial feature The Innocents, he returns again to the supernatural thriller to tell an alarming tale about childhood.

The Innocents follows Ida, a pre-teen girl that has moved into a new apartment complex with her parents and older autistic sister Anna. Anna is non-verbal and doesn’t interact with her environment, having rapidly lost what words she had at the age of four. 

Ida is resentful of her sister and the attention she requires. She takes her anger out by pinching Anna’s leg in the backseat of the car or worse, much worse, putting shards of glass in her shoe. Because Anna does not react, Ida (we eventually learn) falsely assumes Anna does not feel pain. 

At first, Ida is lonely at the complex. She is a lot younger than the boys who play football in the communal courts and Anna’s not much fun. But one day, when wandering in the nearby woods, she meets a boy close to her age named Ben. The two quickly bond and Ben eventually reveals that he has telekinetic powers. 

He also has a mean streak and is a borderline sociopath, but it will take a bit of time and an incident with a cat before Ida begins to really see this side of his personality.

In order to play with Ben, Ida agrees to watch Anna outside. During one afternoon, while Ida is being particularly neglectful, Anna becomes friends with a girl named Aisha who has telepathic powers. Turns out, Aisha can communicate with Anna telepathically and this unlocks latent powers within Anna. With Aisha’s help, Anna even starts to speak some words.

Eventually Ben enters the mix and kids quickly learn that their abilities get stronger the more they play together. But with Ben around, more power does not end up being a good thing. 

I can appreciate that this description of the plot might seem strange and coincidental to those unfamiliar with the movie, but Vogt makes it work by treating the children’s extraordinary abilities with a type of matter-of-fact realism that reminded me of Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Killing of a Sacred Deer. And that’s not where the similarities end. Like Lanthimos work, The Innocents is also a supernatural thriller where the unusual exists without explanation. They are also both films that include horror elements, but don’t fit the mold of a traditional horror film, as they focus more on being deeply disturbing than being scary or gory.

Perhaps the most disturbing element of Vogt’s film is how young the child actors look. Ida and Aisha barely look ready for middle-school. We want, expect even, the children’s interaction to be simple and innocent. But when Ben and Ida start to play together, there is a sense of amoral malice there that feels honest and, dare I say, familiar. Vogt’s exploration of childhood captures something few films do: the reality that for many children, part of figuring out the world involves irrational acts of cruelty. 

But those willing to read Vogt’s film will find the inherent meanness within Ben, and to a lesser extent Ida, come from genuine places. Ben, who lives with his single mother, shows signs of physical abuse. And Ida’s internalized anger comes from the amount of attention her parents are forced to give to Anna. Vogt’s message seems to be that the secret lives of children- you know, the ones children live while parents are not around- are shaped by the quality of their home life.

The Innocents also serves as an allegory about the inevitable loss of innocence that comes when confronted by evil. Aisha serves as the group’s moral compass, but even she is willing to compromise her values when Ben starts getting out of hand. This ends up being true of Anna as well. In contrast, Ben’s cries in the film’s third act show regret for the pain he has caused and the destructive pattern he has locked himself into repeating. 

I have heard some criticisms of The Innocents for Vogt’s hiring of a neurotypical actor to play an autistic character and for showing both of the non-white children as being raised by single mothers. These are both valid criticisms. Of course, it should also be noted that Vogt hired two children with racialized backgrounds though the story did not require them to be and central to his story is an autistic character. I’ll let you decide for yourself which hills you’ll die on, but for me the criticisms aren’t dealbreakers- they are, however, worth mentioning if we are to do better.  

The Innocents may deal with children as its subject matter, but it is a mature modern horror that subverts the killer kid trope into something that conjures up the very real dark truths and moral complexities of many childhoods.  In doing so, Vogt has also succeeded in creating one of the most thought-provoking and critically acclaimed films of 2021. 

Like the parents in the film, most of us have somehow forgotten how traumatic parts of being young can be. If there is a message for parents, it’s that we should listen and show compassion to our children or else we face being completely shut out from their private hells until things take the inevitable tragic turn.