- Directed by Eskil Vogt
- Written by Eskil Vogt
- Stars Rakel Lenora Fløttum, Alva Brynsmo Ramstad, Sam Ashraf
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 57 Minutes
- Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hm45yGSwArY
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
This is a unique take on horror with a nice slow build. Children are so innocent and harmless; if they start developing special powers, nothing can go wrong. Right? The kid actors are all great. The special effects are perfect. This one is a winner well worth the subtitle reading.
Synopsis
A young girl, Ida, wakes up in the back seat of the car. She has a sister, Anna, who is severely autistic. She reaches over and pinches the sister but doesn’t get much of a reaction. They are moving into a new place, and she walks down the beach to stomp on worms.
Ida doesn’t have any friends at the new place, so she tries to make some new ones. She meets Ben, a little boy who shows her a trick. He tells her to drop a stone, and when she does, he makes it fall sideways, presumably using a psychic power.
Ida doesn’t like Anna much. When she finds some broken glass, she makes sure to put some in Anna’s shoe. Elsewhere, Aisha, a little girl with vitiligo, finds that her foot appears to bleed when she puts her shoes on. But it’s just a vision. Anna gets all the attention in the household, and Ida obviously feels neglected.
Aisha goes looking for her cat in Ida’s building. They seem to have some kind of mental connection. That night Aisha asks her mother about praying, but instead of asking for things, she just wants to listen. She hears the voices of people all over the apartment complex.
Ida leaves Anna on the swings while she goes to play with Ben. Aisha comes over and talks to Anna. Ben and Ida find Aisha’s cat, and he drops it down the ten-story stairwell, but the cat survives. Ben then squishes its head, but Ida doesn’t approve of that. On the way home, she sees that Anna and Aisha have become friends.
The next day, Ida and Anna want to go to the park again. Ida goes to the storage room and finds the dead cat. Anna is obsessed with spinning pot lids and frisbees on the ground. When Ben is nearby, she can spin them indefinitely. Ida figures out that Aisha can hear Anna in her mind. We soon see that all these children are fairly neglected.
Anna and Aisha start having mental conversations from separate apartment buildings. Ben can pick up on it too, but a little less. The children practice reading minds and sending messages from greater and greater distances. It’s all a lot of fun for them until Ben gets angry and starts throwing rocks with his mind. Anna sees this, and she and Ben have a battle of wills. Afterward, Aisha gets Anna to actually speak a little out loud.
Ida tells her mother that Anna can speak and play a little, but her mother doesn’t believe it until they demonstrate.
Ben uses his power to throw a frying pan at his mother, and suddenly, Aisha’s mother starts bleeding. No, not really; Aisha just thinks she sees the blood. We see that Anna has started to move things with her mind as well.
On the last trip with the kids, Anna got a huge splinter in her leg and isn’t allowed to play any more. Their mother takes Anna to the park to see Aisha next time, and she hears them talking. That night, we see that Ben’s mother is still dead on the kitchen floor. Ben uses his power to make a man kill the school bully.
The next day, Ida goes to the spot where the murder happened without being told about it. She sees Ben there. Ben tells her that he can make people do things now. He demonstrates. Ben starts causing trouble with the bullies, and both Aisha and Anna can feel it happening. He breaks a kid’s leg from half a block away. Aisha comes to tell him to stop, and he basically force-chokes her until Ida shoves him to break his concentration. Just when you think he’s going to turn on Ida, Anna shows up, and Ben runs off, afraid of her.
Aisha and Anna conspire telepathically about fighting Ben; Ida overhears. Ben takes over Aisha’s mother, who picks up a knife and stabs the little girl. Anna feels the pain, and Aisha dies.
The next day, a strange man follows Ida, Anna, and their father home, but he can’t get in the locked door. Did Ben send him after them?
Ida goes to see Ben, and they go to the footbridge to fly an airplane. She gets him up on the railing and pushes him over. There’s a witness, and he lands in the grass. Suddenly, Ida is in a dark nightmare world full of snakes and killers. Ida steps into real-world traffic and is hit by a car.
She later wakes up in the hospital. Her mother wants to know who the boy Ida pushed off the bridge was – she denies she did that. Ida eventually goes home with a broken leg and sees Ben standing outside the apartment. Anna knows he’s there too. Ida’s mother picks up a knife, and Ida hides in the locked bathroom. The mother says she’s going out for a few minutes, and when Ida comes out of the bathroom, Anna is gone too. Ida decides she was just being paranoid about her mother.
Anna goes outside and starts looking for Ben. They face off across a pond in a busy park. Back at the apartment, Ida gets frustrated. There’s no elevator coming, and she can’t get down the stairs with that cast on. She screams, and her cast explodes; she couldn’t do much of anything before. All the babies, pets, and children in the park sense something is going on, but the parents are clueless. Ida arrives and holds Anna’s hand; together, they concentrate. Ben appears to die, and the park goes back to normal. Anna and Ida go home.
Ida’s mother gets home and is surprised to see that Ida’s cast is off. Anna sits and scribbles on her noisy drawing toy. It appears she may have lost all of her progress.
Commentary
The child actors here are all very good. I couldn’t sit through two hours of a kids’ story otherwise. It’s a slow burn, but you can see things developing even early on. You know things are going to go badly, but it’s not quite clear how for a long while. The suspense grows along with the increase of the kids’ powers.
The bleak apartment house is the perfect setting for this. The four neglected children are bound to get into trouble. Only the method here is new.
This is very, very different from most other horror films. I really liked it a lot.