Butler's Cinema Scene

“THE INNOCENTS”: My rating: B (On Demand)

117 minutes | No MPAA rating

Most of us are sentimental slobs when it comes to kids, telling ourselves that children are — up to a certain age, anyway — blemish free. They’ve not yet discovered the possibility of evil.

The ironically-titled “The Innocents” isn’t having any of that.

This weriting/directing effort from Eskil Vogt (screenwriter of the Oscar-nominated “The Worst Person in the World”) makes a case that the demons of cruelty and destruction inhabit even the youngest of us.

It’s not a comforting thought, but it makes for a majorly creepy movie, thanks to four astonishing performances by child actors.

Little Ida (Rakel Lenora Flottum), her parents and her profoundly autistic older sister Anna (Alva Brynsmo Ramstad) have just moved into a high-rise apartment building in the wooded suburbs of a Norwegian city. The speechless Anna requires so much attention that the unsupervised Ida is left to her own devices.

Almost immediately she finds a new playmate in Ben (Sam Ashraf), a boy several years her senior.

Ben apparently has no friends his own age; indeed, he’s regularly bullied by older kids hanging around the complex.

But he does have unusual skills. Ben demonstrates his ability to move small objects — a bottle cap, for example — using only his mind. Of course he also has a thing for torturing and killing animals.

Apparently he’s not alone in having unusual powers. Aisha (Mina Yasmin Bremseth Asheim), another girl Ida’s age, has her own eerie skill set. Whereas Ben exhibits a sadistic streak, Aisha exudes charity. She silently focuses on Ida’s big sister Anna, who subsequently shows signs of breaking out of her catatonic bubble and actually communicating with the world beyond her head.

To a large extent “The Innocents” takes Ida’s point of view. She matter-of-factly accepts these supernatural events without comment or analysis; she makes no moral judgment on Ben’s clearly psychotic behavior.

But at a certain point the boy’s powers increase to match his pathology; he’ll move from tormenting animals to attacking the older kids and adults who have made his life miserable. What’s a little girl to do?

Vogt doesn’t attempt to explain how these children developed weird skills. Why they developed them, though, may be inferred from their status as victims. Ben and Aisha are dealing with bullying and racial bigotry (both are of Middle Eastern descent in a world of pink-cheeked blondes), and all three have reason to resent their parents.

Grownups here are viewed mostly as background figures…we’re halfway through the film before one of them is seen in closeup. And the adults have no idea of the black magic unfolding around them.

I mean, these are just kids, right?

| Robert W. Butler