2 gibbles out of 5

Director: Tom Shankland

“The Children” is a well put-together film, with some truly creepy kids and touches of elements that other films may shy away from. It’s a solid enough horror-thriller, and people just getting into the genre may rate this higher. But… the film, overall, is fairly weak.

The first problem is with the characters – namely that there are too many. There’s a brief set-up of one sister visiting another, but their families run out to greet each other before I felt there was really a chance to identify who was who. Then, because one parent from each family is poorly developed (the visiting family’s father, the visited family’s mother) it took a while to figure out which of the nineteen hundred children belonged to whom. And our main anchor in the story – the teenage daughter – was portrayed as the “rebellious” child but, although her role is made clear and she gets plenty of screentime, it seems like there were extra bits about her character that the writer/director thought he was implying but… well, too subtle, or too little.

These hopeful subtleties are the next problem. In watching one of the extras, the director explains how he staged a particular action scene (in the shed) to appear very organic, and to make everyone’s motivations clear and realistic. But on screen it just came across as sloppy, both due to jagged editing (waaaay too quick cuts to understand where you are) and a strange lack of tension.

The “hype” for this film was due to breaking the barrier of on-screen violence committed against children, but I was interested more in the psychology the director intended to explore, that being our disbelief in/un-acceptance of the guilt of children, especially our own. Again, though, this is only toyed with loosely, and the characters just aren’t strong enough to make it work. I am sad. Several years ago “Them” (or “Ils”) did a better job with the “Why are you doing this?” theme, and more recently, “Eden Lake” was much more visceral and frightening.