The Innocents is a 2021 Norwegian supernatural thriller written and directed by Eskil Vogt. It premiered at Cannes in July 2021.
The film follows Ida (Rakel Lenora Flottum), a nine-year-old girl, and her older sister Anna (Alva Brynsmo Ramstad), who has severe nonverbal autism, as they move with their family to a large apartment complex. They quickly strike up friendships with two other children who live in the complex - Ben (Sam Ashraf) and Aisha (Mina Yasmin Bremseth Asheim). Before long, all four children begin developing supernatural powers. What follows is a deeply disturbing exploration of childhood psychology and the development of morality.
The Innocents contains examples of:
- 11th-Hour Superpower: After spending the majority of the film without any powers, Ida suddenly gains powers just before the climax. She has telekinesis and is implied to have telepathic abilities as well.
- Abusive Parents: Ben is seen with a large bruise on his torso in one scene and a large cut over his collarbone in another. His mother is also seen sleeping during the day and seems to be distracted by her phone when awake. It's implied that she is either neglectful or outright abusive toward him.
- Adults Are Useless: None of the adults in the film are aware of the children's psychic powers, and the kids don't even consider trying to explain it to them. During the climactic psychic battle between Anna and Ben in a crowded playground, all the nearby children, including babies, are aware that something is going on, but the adults don't notice a thing.
- Agony of the Feet: Ida puts broken glass in Anna's shoes. Anna, who is nonverbally autistic, can't react to pain and so Ida assumes she can't feel it. Aisha, who is The Empath, feels the same pain that Anna does and confirms that Anna is very much aware of what she is feeling.
- Ambiguous Ending: The final shot of the film is Anna scribbling on her drawing pad, then pausing, erasing what she's done, and changing her grip on her pen to a more sophisticated one, leaving it uncertain if she will be able to regain the progress she made with Aisha's influence, or if she will revert to her previous state.
- Astral Projection: Ben has the ability to project his consciousness into others and control them.
- Bad People Abuse Animals: Ben shows his true colors by viciously killing a cat just for the fun of it.
- Beat the Curse Out of Him: Feeling pain will snap you out of Ben's mind control.
- Big Brother Instinct: The first thing Anna does of her own volition is move to protect Aisha when Ben is abusing her.
- Character Development: Ida starts off the film without a proper sense of right and wrong. Her experiences with the empathic Aisha and the psychopathic Ben help her develop empathy and a moral code.
- Chekhov's Skill: Ben first demonstrates his telekinetic abilities by causing falling objects to dramatically veer off to the side. He uses this exact technique to save himself when Ida pushes him off a footbridge, redirecting himself onto the grass instead of the cement road.
- Children Are Innocent: Subverted. The film's title refers to the children's "innocence" in terms of their lack of understanding of good and evil. This is definitively not a good thing.
- Coming of Age Story: A rare variant set at a younger stage of development. The film is not about Ida's transition into adulthood, but rather about her developing a moral conscience for the first time.
- Covers Always Lie: The poster, with Ida "hanging" upside down on the tire swing, implies that she's one of the children with psychic powers, but she spends the film without powers until the final scene.
- Creepy Child: Ida and Ben start out the film this way. Ida casually torments her sister by pinching her and putting broken glass in her shoes, and Ben enjoys torturing and killing animals. As the film goes on, Ida grows out of this behavior and becomes more empathetic, while Ben progresses to being a full-on Enfante Terrible.
- Death of a Child: Of the four human deaths in the movie, three are children.
- Disappeared Dad: Neither Ben nor Aisha have present fathers. Aisha looks at a photo of her father that's displayed in her home, and it's implied by her mother's occasional bouts of crying that he's recently deceased.
- Disproportionate Retribution: Ben, being a child with immense psychic powers and without a functioning moral compass, responds to minor slights with extreme violence. He psychically throws a heavy rock at Ida for playfully calling him a name, and it only gets worse from there. He murders an older boy for bullying him, breaks another boy's leg, and then murders Aisha for telling him to stop.
- The Empath: Aisha can read the thoughts and feel the emotions of others, particularly Anna.
- Enfante Terrible: Ben is already a sick piece of work from the beginning, brutally killing a cat and mutilating its body. But as his psychic powers grow, he becomes even worse. He first murders his mother, then starts possessing adult neighbors to make them murder people that he doesn't like.
- Everyone Has Standards:
- Ben is an Enfante Terrible but has a few fleeting My God, What Have I Done? moments after being particularly brutal.
- Ida is introduced abusing her sister, stomping on a worm, and participating in torturing a cat, but when Ben moves to kill the cat, Ida objects and can't watch. Even before her Character Development, there are limits to her childish sadism.
- Freudian Trio: The violent and psychopathic Ben is the id. The extremely kind and empathic Aisha is the superego. Ida is the ego - she starts off more towards Ben (abusing Anna and having a Lack of Empathy) before Aisha's positive influence helps her to become kinder and more of The Hero.
- The Heart: Aisha is the empathetic and nurturing person in the quartet who tries to keep everyone playing nice.
- Kick the Dog:
- Ida's Establishing Character Moment is pinching her autistic sister, who lacks the ability to emotionally react to pain. Later, she goes even further by putting broken glass in Anna's shoes.
- Ben is shown to be even worse when he drops a cat from several stories up and then stomps on its head to kill it.
- Kids Are Cruel: Ida and Ben are both cruel kids, at least at the beginning.
- Master of Illusion: Ben's method of Mind Control involves trapping his victims' minds in an illusory world.
- Mind Control: Ben can manipulate the minds of others to make them do what he wants.
- Mind over Matter: Ben can manipulate objects with his mind. He starts out by making falling objects veer off, but escalates. Then it turns out that Anna is even more powerful than he is.
- My God, What Have I Done?: Ben is shown to have some vestigial regret for the violence he causes, but it's always fleeting. After mortally injuring the cat, he tears up when he thinks it's dead, but once he discovers that it's still alive, he kills it. Later, he tears up when looking at what he's done to his mother and tries to tend her wounds, but then he ignores her cries for help and lets her die.
- My Significance Sense Is Tingling: Most of the kids in the housing complex can sense when something serious is going on psychically.
- Next Tier Power-Up: The kids' powers strengthen as the film goes on. At first, Ben can only change the direction of light falling objects, but his power increases to full-blown Mind over Matter. He also suddenly gains the ability to perform Mind Control. At first, the kids are only able to use their powers outside, in the outdoor common area of the housing complex, but their range grows over the course of the film.
- Offing the Offspring: Ben uses Mind Control to manipulate Aisha's mother into stabbing her to death.
- Outliving One's Offspring: Aisha's mother is mind-controlled into killing her own daughter, who bleeds out in her arms as she sobs.
- Pet the Dog: Unlike Ida and Ben, who are introduced through as Creepy Children, Aisha is introduced combing her dolls hair and asserting that everyone's hair is pretty in its own way, establishing her as The Heart.
- Psychic Children: The four main children have psychic abilities. The climax of the film implies that all children are psychic to some degree.
- Psychic Link: Aisha and Anna share a link with each other. This link helps Anna, who is severely autistic, to emotionally connect with others, and even helps her to speak.
- Psychic Powers: All four children develop a variety of psychic abilities, but the exact nature and strength of their individual powers varies.
- Pure Is Not Good: A theme of the film. The innocence of children means they lack the capacity to make moral decisions, so they can just as easily be cruel as kind.
- Riddle for the Ages: It's never revealed why children in this housing complex gain psychic abilities or why they seem localized to the playground area.
- Self-Made Orphan: Ben kills his mother with his psychic abilities. It's unclear if he specifically meant to do it, but he doesn't mind much when she's gone.
- Speak in Unison: Aisha and Anna start to do this as their Psychic Link grows. It's unclear if Aisha is speaking through the nonverbal Anna, or just helping Anna to say the things that she wants to say but can't.
- Supernatural Fear Inducer: Ben gives his victims visions of terrifying monsters and uses this to get them to act in the way he wants them to.
- Telepathy: Aisha and Ben can read minds, though Aisha has a much stronger bond with Anna than Ben, and Ben finds Aisha easier to read than Anna.
- Throwing Off the Disability: Ida uses her powers to explode the cast off of her broken leg when she needs to quickly get down the stairs to help her sister at the end of the film.
- Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: Ben and Ida both act in casually cruel ways throughout the first act.
