CHILD'S PLAY
NORWEGIAN FILMMAKER ESKIL Vogt is having a pretty decent 2022. His latest collaboration with Joachim Trier, The Worst Person In The World, earned him an Oscar nod for Best Original Screenplay. And his second feature as a writer/director, The Innocents, is also gathering critical bouquets.
Like Vogt and Trier’s 2017 collaboration Thelma, it explores fantastical territory, as four children aged seven to 11 – Ida, Anna, Aisha and Ben – living on an ordinary Norwegian housing estate discover telepathic and psychokinetic abilities. As their mastery of such skills grows, it leads to some devastating consequences. Such a logline could belong to a pretty generic superhero movie, but this is a far more low-key, realist, child’s-eye-view take on powers.
Vogt’s own children were, in a sense, the inspiration. “I became curious about that time in life again,” he tells . “Watching my kids, I would get memories of my own childhood; suddenly this very everyday memory would appear, and I’d be reminded of how radically different
