Critic Reviews

• The lonely, uncanny and sometimes unthinkingly violent world of childhood is explored with chilling candor and exceptional skill in writer-director Eskil Vogt’s arthouse horror feature The Innocents.

  Rating: 90/100
  The Hollywood Reporter

• This superior chiller is both a satisfying genre exercise and a minute observation of the process by which young children acquire morality; its most striking aspect may just be the empathy Vogt displays for his 7- to 11-year-old stars, and the extraordinary juvenile performances that empathy brings out.

  Rating: 90/100
  Variety

• Skillfully merging menace and sweetness (when Anna begins to speak, her parents’ delight is incredibly touching), The Innocents constructs a superbly eerie moral landscape, one that the children (all of whom are fantastic) must learn to navigate.

  Rating: 90/100
  The New York Times

• The Innocents successfully weds three elements: a strong, original concept distilled through a smart screenplay; excellent young performances; and a mise-en-scene which puts the audience in a child’s circular view of a very small world - tiny by nature of childhood itself, in which the smallest areas are unfathomably large, and also by circumstance on a self-contained housing estate.

  Rating: 80/100
  Screen Daily

• The Innocents is a film about childhood as much as it is about murder, sharing as much DNA with “Boyhood” as it does “The Bad Seed.” Specifically, it’s a film about contemporary childhood and, in a dangerous world that forces kids to grow up faster and faster, whether innocence is even still possible

  Rating: 75/100
  Indiewire

• Childhood is hard, and childhood grudges run harder. The Innocents pulls no punches in turning that fact into horror.

  Rating: 75/100
  The Av Club

• The Innocents adopts a slasher-esque vibe that, however airlessly aestheticized, feels lurid for the sake of being lurid.

  Rating: 50/100
  Slant Magazine