• Dec 11
• Brit horror THE CHILDREN: Review
• Posted by Deljhp - 11/12/08 at 12:22 AM

The Children – Director: Tom Shankland. Review by: Pete Higgins

It’s been quite a year for feel-bad endurance-test movies. The Mist, Eden Lake, and now The Children. Together they’d make an especially bleak triple-bill. On its own, however, The Children is still pretty effective, in its nasty little way. The plot couldn’t be much simpler. There are these two families, you see, and they’re meeting up for New Year, in a nice house in the middle of the countryside. mobile reception? Only available in that one spot, out there on the perimeter of the woods. One of the four children already coughing in a slightly worrying way? Oh, yes. Parents too self-absorbed and/or incompetent to pay attention to what’s going on until it’s much too late? Yes, again.

And therein lies one of this film’s problems. Because the parents are so annoying, it’s hard to care all that much when their children start hacking them to bits. The only teenager (significantly neither adult nor child) in the group should be the focus of our attention from the start, but the script muddles this quite badly. It’s difficult to know who to root for, until, again, it’s too late. Another problem is that the deaths and maimings, when they come, are not as brilliantly shot and edited as they could be. I regard it as cheating to have a character impaled on a spike that we, the audience, didn’t even know was there until it was plunging into someone’s head. Yes, the victim might – indeed, must – be unaware of it, but we should at least have had a brief moment for the spike to be introduced. This isn’t called breaking the rules: it’s called incompetence, I’m afraid, and it proves somewhat wearing.

Likewise, the insistence on flash-frames and jump-cuts weakens the actual legitimate scares and forces the audience to wonder why such cheap tricks are being used. It’s almost as though the writer/director Tom Shankland didn’t trust his own script and actors to carry things along. Which they can’t: unfortunately, the adults in this are not the greatest actors in the world, and the dialogue they are lumbered with only emphasises the point. The children (Freddie Boath, Rafiella Brooks, Jake Hathaway, and Eva Sayer) and the teenager (Hannah Tointon) on the other hand, are all excellent - perhaps because they have to say less, and do more. The film is at its most effective when everyone stops talking. When the camera lingers on the snow and the blood, or on the innocent-looking children, or the trees in the forest, The Children is as chilling as it ought to be. It has ideas above its station, and is badly under-written, but it lingers in the mind even so.  

The Children official site