THE INNOCENTS (2021) is a dark Norwegian film about a group of children who befriend each other over a summer and discover they have paranormal abilities, leading to a tense battle between good and evil. While a bit plodding and visually bare, it slowly ramps into a gripping portrait of childish cruelty and the formation of ethics. I liked this one a lot.

When nine-year-old Ida moves to a housing complex with her parents and older nonverbal, autistic sister Anna, she is feeling resentful. When Anna annoys her–which is often, as Anna gets the lion’s share of attention–Ida pinches her leg, knowing her sister won’t respond. At the housing complex, Ida wanders around bored and looking for someone to play with, at one point stomping on a worm just to see what would happen if she does. Eventually, she meets two other children: Aisha, who has the power of telepathy, which enables her to “talk” to Anna and talk through her, and Ben, who has a minor power of telekinesis. Anna appears to have some power herself. As they all hang out together, they find this proximity sharpens their powers.

Children are pure and innocent, but they can also be cruel as they are still learning ethics and testing their instinctive sense of morality. Ben has been bullied by older kids and we infer ignored and belittled by his mother, making him angry and powerless. But he is powerless no longer. The same cruel urge that leads some kids to pull the wings off flies is now channeled to humans, upon which he can act with impunity. This leads to a choosing of sides and an all-out psychic war.

What an odd juxtaposition of elements exists in this film. Much of the time, we see the kids just being kids. Friends one minute, enemies the next, then the next day doing it all over again in a banal and visually bland setting of family life in a housing complex. As viewers, we’re in their world, a world the adults rule but don’t really live in, full of laughter and fear and play and sometimes outright cruelty. Now throw in paranormal abilities posing an existential threat, and it’s too big for them to handle, much less even articulate. This is a battle of good versus evil among kids just learning what these things really mean, a battle driven by fear of what the other might do, a too-early coming of age through violence and power.

So yeah, overall, I really liked this one. I didn’t enjoy every aspect of it, but the themes were thought provoking, the story distinguished if not unique, the performances by the child actors terrific. As for the story, I found the kids’ quiet, private little war agonizingly gripping, the showdown satisfying if tragically sad.

Warning: violence toward children and animals.

David Cronenberg’s CRIMES OF THE FUTURE (2022) is top-notch sci-fi thick with his signature body horror and fetishization of the grotesque. Critics liked it but audiences apparently didn’t; the film bombed at the box office. Me, I absolutely loved it as something close to a work of genius.

It’s the future, the world is in decline, and humanity goes on evolving both naturally through strange mutations and artificially through strange advances in biotech. Humans don’t feel pain anymore, heal quickly, and don’t suffer infections. In this world, a performance artist couple, Saul Tensor (Viggo Mortensen in an example of perfect casting) and Caprice (Léa Seydoux) performs live surgeries for adoring fans. Saul’s body, we’re told, continually produces mysterious new organs that must be removed, and Caprice removes them in art shows.

The couple form a collision point for two forces. On the one side, the government and its bureaucrats, special police, and assassins are okay with people modifying themselves as long as they register their aberrations and don’t pass them onto future generations in an effort to keep humanity, well, human. On the other side, a group of revolutionary mutants regard their new bodies as the future of the species. Saul’s mind is on one side, though his body may be on the other. In the end, we discover where his true allegiance lies.

This movies is just crazy. It has the same tickling weirdness of Cronenberg’s NAKED LUNCH while offering an alien future that feels utterly lived in. Terrific ideas are presented in a familiar way, such as mutation being a form of self expression that has meaning, surgery as performance art with the artist literally giving a part of himself to the audience, bodily mortification becoming a sexual experience in a species that doesn’t feel pain, and so on. Thematically, the idea of what makes someone human and across what line they become something else is intriguing and actually relevant, considering biotech may enable genetic modification in the future, resulting in biological haves with vital advantages and have-nots who can’t afford it or won’t do it. The special effects are squirm-inducing, the odd juxtaposition of grotesque and fetish jarring, the actors all perfectly inhabiting their roles.

On the downside, it’s not super coherent. The characters speak with a variety of accents, and Viggo Mortensen is always growling or rasping as he’s constantly sick, which made the dialogue a bit hard to follow at times. The overall narrative isn’t as coherent as I’d have liked, ending suddenly and leaving you to tie it all together in your head after it’s over. Overall, it didn’t feel quite complete. I would have loved to see this be a limited series rather than a movie. It would have been mind-blowing.

Anyway, despite these things, I totally loved it and hope Cronenberg isn’t done making movies like this. Highly recommended.

In THE ETERNAL (1998), a woman returns with her husband and son to the remote Irish mansion she’d fled as a child, only to discover herself in thrall to an ancient druid who wants to return. Art house in flavor, shot in a seventies horror style, and downright flippant, this horror film isn’t very loved by viewers or critics, but I had fun with it.

The film starts with a fun-loving husband and wife couple, Jim (a young Jared Harris) and Nora (the very sexy Allison Elliott). Nora has been having strange episodes and memories, leading to her doctor warning her and her alcoholic husband to quit their drinking. Nora, however, feels drawn to go to Ireland and see what’s left of her family. They bring their young son Jimmy, a quiet and shy boy who plays along but kinda looks like he’s slowly being traumatized by his parents’ antics and is bound to grow up to be a fuddy-duddy.

At the mansion, they meet Nora’s eccentric uncle Bill (Christopher Walken), a girl named Alice who seems to be the only sane adult in the place, and Nora’s witch grandmother (Lois Smith). It turns out Bill has disrupted things in several ways, including keeping the mummy of a 2,000-year-old Druid woman in the basement. When the Druid arises, all hell breaks loose on one long night.

I’d never heard of this movie, so when I saw it was available and who was in it, I jumped on it. Overall, it’s pretty weird. The horror touches are stylish and interesting, though never scary. There’s some terrific humor in the characters that pops up in little bursts, though it’s not a comedy. The villain isn’t ominous so much as eccentric, and the monster is interesting and relentless but never really frightening. The sudden arrival of IRA types is right out of left field. And then there’s Jim and Nora, the laughing and blithe alcoholic couple, blundering through everything and for the most part not taking it terrifically seriously, with Jim making little quips (including a hilarious out of nowhere impersonation of Christopher Walken) and interacting with the overly serious Alice in bits that had me laughing out loud.

So I’d recommend THE ETERNAL but caution it takes an open mind. It’s not great horror nor great comedy, but somehow it came together for me to be oddly compelling and a pretty fun time.