31 Films for Halloween, #9: The Innocents (2021)

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 The Innocents (2021) reminds us that children are not normal.

I don't mean "children who have mysteriously acquired a variety of metal superpowers".  I don't even mean Nordic children.  Just... children.

Their brains are not yet fully formed. They don't have the intellectual capacity to process all the experiences and emotions they have. They have too little experience of the world to know what is normal and what is not.  

Now. Give those people superpowers. How does that turn out...?

Don't go into this film expecting to see people throwing cars around with their minds. You can watch Chronicle for that.  In Chronicle what happens is inevitable in the manner of a Greek tragedy.  But the outcome of The Innocents is a nail biter to the end.

Aside from all its technical prowess, The Innocents does three things quite well. 

It shows the importance of parenting and the effect you are having on your children even when you aren't paying attention. ESPECIALLY when you aren't paying attention.

Another is the fact that 'the innocents' aren't the children; it's the adults. There is a titanic struggle going on in their children's world, right beneath their notice, and they are UTTERLY oblivious to it.  Not in an unrealistic way simply because the plot requires them to be. Rather, in a totally realistic way, because KIDS HIDE STUFF out of natural instinct.

THIS is one of the tensest scenes I have seen in any film since "Corky's Five Minutes" in Magic (1978).

And, finally, eerily, it shows that to kids, for whom MOST experiences are new and weird, and who have little sense of what is normal, acquiring different superpower is in the same basket as "hey, look I can roll my tongue? Can you?"  

THAT, in the final analysis, is what makes this film so creepy. 

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