JP Nunez
I love The Innocents, and I’m not talking about the brilliant 1960 adaptation of Henry James’s classic novella The Turn of the Screw (although I adore that movie as well). I’m talking about the Norwegian film of the same name that came out here in the States just last year. It was a bit under the radar, so it didn’t get nearly as much buzz as it deserved, but it was still one of my favorite movies of 2022. In my review of the film, I called it “a slow-burn masterpiece,” and after revisiting it a few times in the last several months, I still stand by those words.
Seriously, just about everything in this movie is executed to perfection. For example, the characters are super likable, the story is really intriguing, and the horror is pretty effective. But the more I watch the film, the more I’m struck by something else about it, something I didn’t mention in my review: its message. The Innocents is essentially about a bunch of kids who slowly lose their innocence and learn about morality in one of the most horrific ways possible, and in telling that story, the movie also conveys a really great message about the importance of protecting the weakest and most vulnerable members of our society.
The Basic Story
To see how, let’s start by looking at the basic plot of the film. It begins with a young girl named Ida moving to a new apartment with her parents and her intellectually disabled sister Anna, and soon after the family arrives, Ida meets a boy around her age named Ben. He shows off some very modest (but still really cool) telekinetic abilities, and unsurprisingly, his new friend is super impressed.
A bit later on, the pair meet another girl named Aisha who possesses some telepathic abilities and who also has a special psychic connection with Anna, and from there, these kids become pretty formidable. Eventually, Anna develops powers of her own, and by the end of the movie, Ida becomes psychic as well. But most importantly, Ben’s initially meager abilities soon grow to massive proportions. His telekinesis becomes stronger as the story progresses, and when he gains the ability to telepathically control people as well, he quickly goes down a dark path.
For instance, there’s a scene earlier in The Innocents where Ben is playing soccer, and an older boy comes over to him and picks on him a bit. It’s pretty humiliating, so when Ben’s powers become strong enough, he decides to take revenge. He gets into an adult’s head and makes him kill the kid, and later on, when he sees some other boys playing soccer, he uses his telekinesis to give one of them a serious injury.
He also kills Aisha and his own mother, and after he tries to kill Ida too, Anna and Ida have to combine their powers and kill him so he doesn’t hurt anyone else. It’s a super tragic conclusion to a heart-rending story, but it was the only way to protect the people around them. Ben was a monster who would’ve gone on to use his powers in even worse ways if he wasn’t stopped, so as much as it hurt our protagonists (particularly Ida) to take their friend’s life, it had to be done.
The Basic Message
From that brief plot summary, we can already begin to grasp the basic message of The Innocents. It’s about a kid with superpowers who uses his abilities to terrorize people who are helpless to fight back, and that’s a pretty obvious metaphor for the various ways people in the real world abuse and exploit the weakest and most vulnerable members of society.
In fact, the movie makes that parallel pretty explicit. Think back to the kid who picks on Ben while he’s playing soccer. This boy is older, bigger, and stronger than Ben, so in their initial confrontation, Ben is helpless to fight back, and the kid is able to bully him without any repercussions. Then, later on in the film, their roles flip-flop. Once Ben gains the ability to control people’s actions, he becomes the stronger one, and he uses that strength to bully the kid who once bullied him.
Similarly, when Ben watches a group of kids playing soccer and uses his powers to seriously hurt one of them, he’s once again acting like the boy who picked on him. In fact, in a certain sense, the parallel is even clearer this time. It’s not a coincidence that these kids are playing soccer just like he was when he got picked on. It’s supposed to show that he’s stepping into the shoes of the older boy who bullied him, and he’s doing the exact same thing to this poor kid.
Those two scenes let us know without a doubt that Ben is a walking metaphor. He represents the various ways people exploit and abuse the weakest and most vulnerable members of society, and The Innocents uses his fantastical reign of terror to show how evil that kind of behavior truly is. It has absolutely no place in our world, so whenever we see it happening, we should be like the film’s heroes, Ida and Anna, and use our strengths and abilities to protect those who can’t protect themselves.
A Specific Example
That’s the basic message of the film, but if we go a bit deeper, we can see that it also applies that general idea to a specific group of people: the intellectually disabled. Throughout The Innocents, we also see a few other, slightly more subtle parallels to Ben’s abusive behavior, and many of them involve Ida’s severely autistic sister Anna.
For instance, in the opening scene of the movie, as their family is traveling to their new apartment, Ida spitefully pinches her sister’s leg and twists it in a way that looks painful. Similarly, a bit later on, Ida puts broken glass in one of Anna’s shoes, and when their mother finally takes the shoe off, the poor girl’s sock is soaked in blood.
Those are just a few examples of Ida’s abusive behavior towards her sister, but they’re enough to make my point. Even though Ida eventually learns to love and accept Anna, her attitude at the beginning of The Innocents is very different. She bullies and abuses her sister simply because she knows Anna can’t defend herself, and at one point in the movie, she even gets Ben to join in as well.
It’s really cruel, and it highlights a sad truth about our world today. When I’m not reviewing and analyzing horror movies, I work as a special education aide, so I’ve seen firsthand how the intellectually disabled are often treated as less than human. Many of them are unable to speak up or defend themselves in any way, and unfortunately, a lot of people are all too ready to take advantage of that vulnerability.
It’s pretty sickening, and this kind of abuse will just continue indefinitely unless the rest of us take a stand. Granted, I’m not saying that everybody has to become a full-time advocate for the intellectually disabled, but those of us who live, work, or are involved with that community in any way need to do everything we can to protect and defend them.
And the same goes for every other vulnerable community, as well. Whether it’s the intellectually disabled, the elderly, the very young, or anybody else, it’s always a terrible evil to abuse or exploit other people. Every human being deserves to be treated with dignity and respect, so we all have an obligation to stand up for the weakest and most vulnerable members of our society when they can’t stand up for themselves, just like Ida and Anna do at the end of The Innocents.
