THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – TO SEE
Somewhere in a Norwegian suburb, a no-man’s land made strangely deserted by the summer exodus. Bars of buildings surrounded by forests, playgrounds for children. Four kids will meet there, gauge each other, discover each other and unite before the a priori indivisible group that they constitute deteriorates in a bloody way.
We guess that the first feature film by Eskil Vogt, recently Audience Award and Critics’ Award at the Gérardmer Fantastic Film Festival and discovered in the Un certain regard selection at the last Cannes Film Festival, seems to make a point of plunging its supernatural postulate in an easily identifiable social reality. Realism is here the essential condition to accept the extraordinary but also to allow the viewer to never move away from the familiarity of a universe whose obviousness must be immediately accepted.
Ida moves in with her parents and her autistic sister in a new apartment. She befriends two little neighbors. All discover gifts of telekinesis and telepathy (the power to move objects and enter the brains of others), all the more developed as they can act in concert, each feeding on the powers of the others. Gradually, however, the group broke up. One of the two young boys in the band turns out to be a psychopath and incapable of repressing the murderous use of his gifts.
Combination of irrationality and social realism
By thus trying never to detach his little superheroes from their nature as ordinary kids, Eskil Vogt, who is also the screenwriter of his own film, tries to examine this often elusive state, and source of many clichés in the cinema: that of childhood, its complexity and its radical otherness. The absence of affects, inhumanity and a kind of natural cruelty define the main protagonists in a film which does not hesitate to quote, the time of a sequence of an abused cat in a stairwell, Naked Childhood by Maurice Pialat.
Gender also appears as a way of fantasizing about the threat of a certain social and racial order.
But if the combination of irrationality and social realism is particularly successful here, it is because the filmmaker seems to have found an ideal rhythm, that of a dramatic progression that is both implacable and regularly rich in surprises, the trace of socially determined and the brutal intrusion of supernatural events. It is to the conjugation of two fatalities that The Innocents.
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