Child's Play

Oscar-nominee Eskil Vogt’s new film The Innocents is not your usual tale of kids with incredible powers

- By Ian Berriman. Photographs by Alamy

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 SFX. “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 it is to be a child. You experience the world in such a different way. You have no concept of what’s possible and what’s not. It’s so difficult to distinguish between your imagination and reality. You feel things so intensely, and have no way of protecting yourself from those feelings. I felt, ‘I can’t enter into that world as an adult, but maybe I can make a film about that secret, closed-off world of childhood?’”