Most evil-kid movies—The Omen, The Exorcist, the Village of the Damned films, and on and on back to The Bad Seed in 1956—are frank about their intentions. They're horror flicks, and they want to freak you out. You know this when you set out to see them: It's the reason you're going. However, The Innocents, a new movie from Norway, is decidedly different. The picture has memorable horror flourishes—a good bit of blood, some painfully punctured flesh, a flash of broken bone—but its real subject is evil itself: What is it? Where does it come from? And why are some people ensnared by it while others slip free?
The writer-director, Eskil Vogt—nominated for an Oscar last year for co-writing The Worst Person in the World—has set his troubling story firmly in the world of children. There are grownups around in the suburban apartment building where it takes place, but as in real life, they're distracted and not entirely present for their progeny. When one mother hears her daughter mysteriously murmuring in another room and asks who she's talking to, and the little girl responds, "Someone who isn't here," her weary mom just says, "Okay."
