Very few horror films are so horrifying as to make me not want to finish watching it but this one qualifies. It does this not by using shots of gore or jump scares but by having you realize that all of the characters in it are children, and that by being children they are capable of doing anything because they don’t know any better. This film is similar in many ways to Chronicle which I’ve always felt was underrated and it does a great job at front-loading the horror to make you understand that anything can happen in it. Still the inherent constraints of its chosen genre, such that only the children know what is going on and matter, made it irritating to me after a while. To me, it’s a very strong film but some way short of being great.
Ida resents her elder sister Anna who suffers from nonverbal autism and is unable to speak or communicate coherently. Due to her handicap, their parents pay more attention to Anna and neglect her. Ida takes out her frustrations by cruelly pinching Anna or even harming her in worse ways and Anna doesn’t respond at all. The family moves to a new apartment and because it is summer, school is out and most of the residents nearby are on vacation. While playing outside Ida meets Ben, a cruel boy who thinks nothing of hurting a cat to amuse himself. Meanwhile Anna meets Aisha and the two seem to form a psychic connection, allowing them to communicate with each other. Ben shows Ida that he has a very weak form of telekinesis, moving small and light objects with his mind. The four of them experiment with their abilities and they discover that Anna too possesses telekinesis. At first, they play around with their abilities to amuse themselves but Ben soon escalates to using them to hurt and even kill other people.
The characters in here are much younger than those in Chronicle and the escalation doesn’t go as far but the basic premise seems rather similar. By making them children however, this story is far more horrific as Ida goes along with Ben’s pranks at first out of boredom and because she is frustrated at being neglected by her parents. It only slowly dawns on her how truly evil Ben is and how dangerous he is with his power. The obvious weakness here is that the film doesn’t do much to explain how and why Ben is the way he is. We’re just expected to accept that he is indeed evil even if in many ways, he is still just a boy. I liked how the film uses some rudimentary effects to make their mundane apartment complex feel more eerie during the dream sequences. The simple expedient of filming the buildings upside down works well and must be cheap. Yet this is only a matter of aesthetics and atmosphere and doesn’t contribute to the story or the theme.
As my wife observes, this genre relies on the children being part to a secret world that is inaccessible to adults, hence only the children are allowed to have any agency in resolving the conflict. To me, this works if the stakes are small but this film escalates the stakes so much that the adults seem like idiots for not noticing that the children have superpowers and it seems unreasonable to me that Ida won’t tell her mother what is happening. This breaks the suspension of disbelief for me and leads me to take it less seriously. The initial sense of horror is fantastic yet I disliked how subsequent events play out. It’s a very strong horror film but it’s another one of those that could have been better.