The babes in the woods of Eskil Vogt’s “The Innocents” are some of the scariest kids you’ll see on movie screens this year. Bored over the summer holidays and living in a large Norwegian housing development, they while away the long summer hours inflicting a kind of casual cruelty on animals and other children, motivated by childish curiosity, subconscious trauma and newly discovered psychic abilities. With a careful economy of storytelling, Vogt lays out how and why these kids end up trapped in this destructive cycle.
Ida (Rakel Lenora Fløttum), with an imperceptible expression and long curtain of blond hair, arrives at her new home, an apartment in a large complex next to a forest, with her parents and older sister, Anna (Alva Brynsmo Ramstad), who is severely autistic, nonverbal. Anna is doted over by their parents, and Ida is left to face the playground by herself, where she meets Benjamin (Sam Ashraf), who wants to show her a trick.
Benjamin has discovered that he can move objects with his mind, using deep concentration to fling a bottle cap across the forest floor. It amuses Ida, and the two forge a unique friendship, based around their own dark predilections, experimenting with misbehavior and animal cruelty, kidnapping a wayward cat for a prank that turns harrowingly violent.
