A Norwegian housing estate becomes the village of the damned in this icily brilliant supernatural tale from film-maker Eskil Vogt, who as a screenwriter is known for his collaborations with Joachim Trier; rather amazingly, his movie before this brutal chiller was their co-scripted romantic comedy The Worst Person in the World. As for The Innocents, it might yet become a scary-movie classic: it greased my palms with anxiety and incidentally has some of the best child acting I have ever seen. See it now before Hollywood comes along and messes up your perception with a dodgy remake. (Having said which, Steven Spielberg or Brian De Palma might well have been interested in this script in their younger days, or maybe even now.)
Vogt places us in a pleasant, if featureless residential development in Romsås, Oslo, with 60s-style high-rise buildings near an artificial lake and picturesque woodland. Ida (played by newcomer Rakel Lenora Fløttum) is a moody nine-year-old who resents her mum and dad paying so much attention to her elder sister Anna (Alva Brynsmo Ramstad), who is autistic. As the long hot summer drags on, Ida is left to play outside, and tasked with looking after Anna. But Ida leaves her sister alone on the swings one day while she goes off with a new friend: a boy called Ben (Sam Ashraf) who shows her a strange mental trick he can do, making a bottle cap fly through the air without touching it. He also has a nasty predilection for torturing animals.
