For us, “The Innocents” is one of the most disturbing and best superhero films ever made – and above all, completely different from the comic fare of Marvel, DC and Co. You can see this for yourself on TV today. 3Sat will show “The Innocents” this Friday, February 16 from 10:25 p.m. Alternatively, the film is also available as a subscription to Amazon Prime Video:
“The Innocents”: a five-star masterpiece
The focus is on nine-year-old Ida (Rakel Lenora Fløttum), who moves to an apartment building with her parents. She takes out her frustration about her gloomy new environment on her defenseless older sister Anna (Alva Brynsmo Ramstad). She cannot speak and is constantly harassed by Ida. But then Anna meets Aisha (Mina Yasmin Bremseth Asheim), who appears to have telepathic powers, while Ida meets the telekinetic Ben (Sam Ashraf), someone who is on the same page as her when it comes to sadistic pranks. With superpowers behind him, the situation quickly escalates.
“Even such emphatically nihilistic comedy adaptations as ‘The Punisher’ or ‘The Boys’ suddenly seem like a child’s birthday party compared to the no-nonsense brutality of some scenes in ‘The Innocents’.”, our editor-in-chief Christopher Petersen writes in the FILMSTARTS review of ‘The Innocents’. For this it even has the highest rating of 5 stars!
For him, ‘The Innocents’ is even the best film of 2022. In our major poll together with Moviepilot, he finished in tenth place. But the devastating horror drama by director and screenwriter Eskil Vogt is still far too unknown.
If you want to take a look now, be warned. Even at the German premiere at the Fantasy Film Festival, where the audience is very used to a faster pace, some viewers threw in the towel in bewilderment. ‘The Innocents’ is ultimately ‘mercilessly evil’, as the conclusion of the already quoted 5-star review says, but also ‘mercilessly good’ and thus “a masterpiece as radical as it is devastating.”