Review #235: The Innocents (1961)

This review was originally written in October 2022.

Gabe's 100 Bucket List Horror Films Review #89: The Innocents (1961)

The Innocents is a story about a young woman, Miss Giddens, being hired by a wealthy uncle to serve as governess (whatever that is) to his orphaned niece and nephew, Flora and Miles. (I mean, I can piece together through context clues that it's some kind of a housekeeper/babysitter/teacher/surrogate mother figure, but I guess I'm just starting off this review by expressing how completely disconnected I feel from the characters in this story because what could I possibly have in common with any of these people? Even the jobs they work are concepts that are utterly foreign, not to mention every single moment of their day to day lives. But I digress.) As the days go by, Miss Giddens begins to notice strange things around the house- shadowy silhouettes, disembodied voices, odd behavior from the children- and as she investigates, it seems to all be related to two previous workers in the house, who died under mysterious circumstances a few months earlier.

Maybe it was already obvious but I didn't care for this film. It's a very slow burn, with huge swaths of the movie just serving to set up the atmosphere for the events to come, and so much screen time is spent watching two people talk about what they think is going on rather than actually seeing what is going on. I'm not saying that a slow burn can't be good (there's been plenty on this bucket list so far that I thought were great), but it's really important that I care about the characters involved, and in this case, I simply didn't. I have no context for what any of these people are going through. The children live basically on their own with no contact with anyone not getting paid to care for them, despite hearing about several house staff we only ever meet one besides Miss Giddens (Mrs. Grose, the maid) and she spends most of the movie refusing to cooperate with Miss Giddens on her investigation of the odd happenings. The core story seems to be about the spirits of these two previous staff members possessing the children, but they never really make it clear whether this is actually happening or if it's just Miss Giddens imagining things (which is usually a type of thing I love- I'm almost always down for an ambiguous resolution like that- but in this case I feel like I had so little to sink my teeth into that it made the whole movie seem like it had no substance whatsoever).

I read all of the trivia and such on IMDB and from the looks of it, this movie is incredibly well-regarded by lots of famous people. I'm sure a lot of work went into making this, but I just didn't see anything that grabbed me in its entire 100-minute runtime. Maybe this film was revolutionary for introducing us to the idea of children being secretly evil? I don't know, but watching it for the first time today I just didn't care for it.

Overall Rating: 3/10 Flying Turtles

Horror Cameo: Apparently, audio from this film of Miles singing can be heard during the cursed video tape that plays in the 2002 horror movie The Ring!