The Innocents

• The Innocents premiered in the Un Certain Regard section of the 74th Cannes Film Festival in July 2021, and later won a Special Mention at Sitges Film Festival that October.
• The Innocents was Eskil Vogt's second film as director, following his 2014 debut Blind — both scripts he wrote himself. Vogt is better known as Joachim Trier's longtime co-writer, credited on Reprise, Oslo August 31st, Louder Than Bombs, Thelma, and The Worst Person in the World.
• Casting took about a year of open auditions across Norway. The role of Anna was originally written as an older boy, but was rewritten as a young girl once Vogt cast Alva Brynsmo Ramstad, who plays Ida's nonverbal older sister.
• Editor Jens Christian Fodstad, a frequent Vogt collaborator going back to Blind, won the Amanda Award (Norway's national film prize) for his editing on The Innocents.
• Vogt researched Anna's nonverbal autism by reading autism researcher Olga Bogdashina's work and speaking with parents of autistic children; even so, some critics and disability advocates pushed back on the film's 'magical disability' framing and the casting of a non-autistic actress in the role.

Anna isn't actually autistic. She's been telepathic since birth and shut down verbal communication because the noise of other minds was unbearable. Her 'breakthrough' isn't therapy working. It's finally finding other kids who share her frequency.

The children's powers aren't supernatural at all. The film is a literalized metaphor for how children process trauma and neglect. Ida's cruelty, Ben's escalation, Aisha's empathy, Anna's silence, each power maps to a coping mechanism. The horror is that nobody around them notices.

Ben doesn't become evil. He was always the only one honest about what the powers are for. The other children's morality is just timidity wearing a mask. The film's most disturbing implication is that Ben is the most realistic child on screen, not the worst.

Four kids discover they can do things they shouldn't during a Norwegian summer break from adult supervision. Ida's nonverbal older sister Anna starts communicating telepathically. Ben moves objects with his mind. Aisha can feel what others feel. What begins as a playground secret sharpens into something cruel and electric. The children test their powers on animals, on each other, on strangers who can't fight back. There's no villain here, no shadow government lab, no chosen one prophecy. Just children with abilities they don't understand and no reason to stop.