The Innocents review: creepy slow-burn horror from the Stephen King school

With a new movie version of Stephen King’s Firestarter Just arrived and the third version of his novel Salem’s Lot on the way, it’s worth wondering whether creators will ever run out of King material to recycle or reboot. If they do eventually hit a point of diminishing returns on reusing the same material — and with King books now being mined for TV miniseries on every streaming network from HBO Max to Epix, they might — at least there’s the option of making stories that Please feel like Stephen King classics. Stranger Things, a series openly inspired by King’s work, It is the most well-known and popular example. Midnight MassOder Marrowbone often capture one particular aspect or another of King’s writing. This is the new chilling horror film The InnocentsIt feels more like a King’s story than any other actual adaptations.

There’s no one model for what “a Stephen King story” feels like — the same man wrote the streamlined fantasy novel Eyes of the DragonThe post-apocalyptic, detail-rich epic The Stand, and the monster-free coming-of-age story “The Body,” later adapted as Be there for me. The Innocents specifically feels like King in the “kids in trouble” mode he brought to stories as diverse as Not-Such Things, The Institute, ItYes, Firestarter — Stories in which children face threats beyond their comprehension, while adults try to help them.

Written and directed by Norway’s Eskil Vogt (co-writer of frequent best-of-2021 list-maker The World’s Most Evil Person), The Innocents Follows a group children as they navigate their supernatural abilities. This description may sound familiar, but it is not uncommon in this era of super-young stories. Brightburn You can find more information here Raising DionYou can find more information here Midnight Special, The Innocents’ execution is specific and refreshing. Vogt makes deliberate, thoughtful choices that amp up the story’s drama and horror without ever turning it into the kind of action-centric special-effects showcase Americans have come to expect even from their low-budget superpower stories. He channels an especially King-esque horror as Vogt helps the children to see how insignificant the adults are, and how lonely they feel.

Image: IFC Midnight

Rakel Lenora Fløttum stars as Ida, an 8-year-old Norwegian girl whose family has just moved to an apartment complex in a new city after her father took a new job. Ida’s parents are loving and supportive, but their time is heavily occupied by the move and by Ida’s autistic older sister, Anna (Alva Brynsmo Ramstad), who is nonverbal and mostly absorbed with sounds and textures. Periodically tasked with looking after Anna while their parents are busy, Ida clearly sees her as a burden and a slight embarrassment, especially as she’s awkwardly trying to make new friends in a new place.

As Ida begins to form a bond with Ben (Sam Ashraf), Anna meets Aisha (Mina Yasmin Bremseth Asheim), a younger girl who is able to communicate with Anna telepathically. Ben is also found to possess low-grade psychic abilities, however, when they are together, the children become stronger. It’s never clear where these abilities come from, or whether their exponential growth is the result of group proximity or practice. But their rapid development has unsettling results when one of the four starts using their growing abilities to act out in violent ways — and has no adult moral boundaries to limit what comes next.

That setup sounds a bit like Josh Trank’s 2012 faux-found-footage supers movie ChronicleExecution, not in principle The Innocents ends up feeling a lot more like Tomas Alfredson’s low-key 2008 vampire movie Allow the right one in. The kids’ performances are naturalistic and low-key, and the writing lets them feel a lot more like movie kids than movie kids normally do. They aren’t given to talking about their feelings or making weighty, telling statements that lay out important themes about power and responsibility. They are more inclined to react instinctively than they are to explain, and prefer actions over explanations.

Sometimes the film feels slow and disoriented due to the naturalistic approach. The glacial development of the kids’ powers leads to a lot of repetition as they experiment and interact. Dread lurks over most of the film, from the opening sequence where Ida hurts Anna just to see her response up until a climactic act that’s all the more startling because it’s so understated. But that dread never resolves on a scale large enough to feel cathartic — one thing that marks The Innocents As distinct from the inspirations it seems. Even Allow the right one in Each version had an explosive ending.

This is Stephen King’s Stephen King-esque masterpiece. The InnocentsThe most striking thing about the movie is its complete indifference to childhood. Kids, the film implies, are just as likely to commit atrocities as adults are — they’re only limited by their lack of power and their lack of prejudice. Where movies often consider children off-limits as targets for the worst of whatever’s lurking in the dark, Vogt visits most of his worst horrors on, as the title says, innocents. The horror elements are understated, but keen — there’s a sequence of animal cruelty that may be hard for pet owners to stomach, and the fact that it’s clearly meant to set up one character’s childish lack of empathy and obliviousness to consequences just makes it more unnerving. And the child cast isn’t any safer when things get dark.

Image: IFC Midnight

At the same time, there’s a compelling and particularly horrifying sense that none of what happens in the movie particularly comes as a surprise to them. Children are still young enough that they can expect new experiences every day and not be able to distinguish between something commonplace and something more unusual. Just the way Ida never really considers telling her mother the truth about what’s going on in her life is a source of small, everyday terror for a feeling audience.

For patient viewers — the kind of audiences who enjoy King’s most sprawling thousand-page books because of the way they gradually create thoroughly immersive environments and characters — The Innocents This is an amazing feat. It is easy to see why the kids are so convincing and charming. That’s true even though that camera — courtesy of cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grøvlen — is unusually active, moving close in on Fløttum’s face as she tries to process new threats or new information and swirling upside down to unnerve and disorient viewers.

However, craft and performance are important. The Innocents is mesmerizing because of its particular take on the banality of evil, on the everyday sense that no one ever fully knows what’s going on in someone else’s head. The parents here don’t realize their children are caught in a life-or-death struggle. The children can’t see how desperately they need help and intervention. Only the audience knows everything, and sees — early on, and with a slow-building sense of sickening inevitability — where this supernatural conflict is going. It’s the type of perspective King excels at creating, but here, it comes with a sense of lulling calm and slow-burn stillness that’s as frightening as any of the third-act explosions he’s ever written.

The InnocentsThe film has a limited theatrical release. You can rent it or buy it. Amazon,VuduOther digital platforms.