The Innocents (2021)

Eskil Vogt's The Innocents places four children in a Norwegian housing estate, hands them telekinesis, and then watches what childhood does with that kind of leverage. The cast is notably multiethnic for a Norwegian production, and the film never says a word about it. Sam Ashraf, Mina Yasmin Bremseth Asheim, and Kadra Yusuf simply occupy their roles as neighbors and mothers and friends, which is either quiet confidence or indifference. We lean toward the former, though the film itself offers no racial commentary, no social critique, nothing to file under consciousness of any kind. The diversity is present. The argument is not.

The emotional center belongs to Anna, a nonverbal autistic girl played by Alva Brynsmo Ramstad. Her condition is treated with patience and specificity instead of pity, and her halting acquisition of speech, coaxed along by Aisha, supplies the film with its only genuine tenderness. This is the one place where the film's sensibility aligns with current cultural preoccupations, and it earns the alignment by observing rather than advocating. Elsewhere, the two sisters eventually combine forces to destroy the violent boy who terrorizes them, a resolution that reads as structural more than ideological. No thesis is spoken. None is needed.

The remainder of the checklist goes unfilled. No environmental lament, no economic grievance, no body politics, no queer subtext, no rewriting of the historical record. The film asks how children assemble a moral sense, and it answers with dread, ambiguity, and a dead cat. That is the correct approach. A lesser production would have told us what to think. This one shows us a boy on an overpass and lets the silence do the work.