Eskil Vogt’s The Innocents is an even more powerful film than his The Worst Person in the World. It has an even deeper moral mission. With miraculous performances by the central four children, it’s a gripping horror story with ever widening implications.
The title recalls Jack Clayton’s 1961 adaptation of Henry James’s The Turning of the Screw. There a governess — emblem of Restrained Civilization — discovers a harrowing evil in her young charges, subverting the usual equation of children with innocence. In Vogt’s film, four children discover an ability to communicate telepathically, to initially constructive but ultimately disastrous end.
The drama occurs in a summer lull, when many neighbours are away on holiday and the school-free kids roam the playgrounds and forests. The setting is an apartment complex on a beach, i.e., the modern urban edging into the primeval source of life.
The central figures are a family with two daughters, the observant young Ida and the older Anna, whose autism has suspended her ability to speak. As the opening shot is of a dozing Ida the whole story can be taken as her dream or as her narrative of moral awakening.
The two girls’ family is the film’s only complete unit. Against Ida’s wishes, they have moved to a new city for her father’s job. The sisters’ adventure and discovery derive from their relationship with two children from immigrant families, neither of which has a father. In contrast to Ida’s family blondness, the sinister Ben is East Indian and the sensitive Aisha African. Aisha’s facial pigmentation is a swirl of light and dark, heightening the theme of racial identification.
As if personifying the richness of imported racial and cultural diversity, the abnormal mental powers are introduced by Ben and Aisha. But any human power is ambivalent. Ben’s evil treatment of a black cat is an extension of the child’s amorality we see when Ida early pinches her unexpressive sister and — even worse — places shards of glass in her sister’s shoe. Aisha is the positive force, understanding, enabling, caring for the others and eager to oppose the evil.
But with the innocence that still emanates from children, Ben is as much the victim as the proponent of his evil power. At first he’s bemused by his ability mentally to move bottle caps. When he meets Aisha and her telepathy they bring Anna an ability conventional science couldn’t. She begins to speak. Instead of her chaotic etch-a-sketch swirls she draws the shark in the distant Aisha’s thoughts.
Ben’s power turns against him when he finds he can control other people. He sends one stranger to kill a playground bully. Another is unknowingly locked out of his mission to kill the sisters.
With the moral order thus upset, one of the mothers is killed, another mother kills her daughter, and the third seems on the verge of being despatched to kill hers. The murders among the mothers reveal a human nature run amok. Yet at the peak of his power Ben recoils on his floor, crying “Mommy!” He is himself the tragic victim of his own unnatural strength.
During the climactic mental showdown between Ben and Anna, several other children in the complex, newly returned to end-of-summer real life, show an awareness of the event that the adults lack. So this story is not about individual freaks of nature but of a lurking, potentially assertive class. Specifically, the film allocates this power to our most powerless, our children. The adults here don’t know what forces they are suppressing in their ostensible control of their kids.
Here the film shows its political dimension. In The Birds Hitchcock undermined human complacency by unleashing a natural force that mankind usually controls. The film revived the Copernican revolution by dislodging man from the the center of his universe. Here Vogt attributes a monstrous, ambivalent power to a suppressed underclass. These children can be read as the suppressed, the oppressed, the neglected, in any contemporary society. The film reminds us that such forces need not stay helpless victim but can collectively assert a power we might well be advised to start treating with sensitivity and generosity instead of oppression.
As the genre classically works, this is a horror story about the disruption caused by some monster. But here the monsters are not from outer space, or the Hydean beasts within that disrupt the Jeckyll order. The monster here is not even the supernatural force that occupies the children in Villlage of the Damned. Even more chilling, the evil here is an obviously hopeful good, the mental power that could liberate the helpless, that instead is turned to the evil of selfish abuse. Ben’s suffering from how he uses his power should be a global warning.
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