Like its Netflix neighbor “The End of the F***ing World,” “The Innocents” follows teen lovers on the run in Great Britain. “World” is a punchy dark comedy, with episodes running about twenty minutes, while “Innocents” is a supernatural romance, slick but sincere, with a prestige-TV gloss and a pop sensibility. A typical installment takes twice as much time to evoke youthful turmoil and set up the action scenes (car chases, foot races, fantastical transmutations), which accessorize its melancholy with thrills.
Opening on one of its panting pursuits, the series perpetrates a literal cliffhanger within its first ninety seconds. One bearded man runs after another up rocky hills, past moss and pine, to a bluff above a steel-gray river. The pursuer (Guy Pearce, hardily costumed in a field coat closed by dramatic toggles) snatches the pursued (Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson, who initially resembles a distraught Barbour-catalogue model) away from the edge. The setting is remotest Norway, where glaciers carved high drama into the landscape and also seem to influence the pace. In the speed of its plot, which features achronological curlicues, sulky repetitions, and dilatory musing on questions of selfhood, “The Innocents” occasionally suggests a young-adult “Westworld.”
Looking in on a quasi-medical interrogation room, we begin to catch on that Pearce’s character is a mad scientist, named Halvorson, who tinkers with destiny by experimenting on shape-shifters. His subjects are women who, with a bit of rigorous neck-stretching and some understated C.G.I. work, mutate into duplicates of people they’ve touched. The man he tackled on the bluff was, in fact, a woman, who had helplessly transformed into the double of his chief accomplice, Steinar. Halvorson’s objectives are ethically dubious, but his rimless eyeglasses are splendid.
Another of his subjects is the mother of the protagonist, June McDaniel (Sorcha Groundsell). We encounter June, a doe-eyed English schoolgirl, on the cusp of her sixteenth birthday. It’s been three years since Mum split, and June’s stern father plans to move the family to a distant island, the better to satisfy his inclinations as a military transport aircraft among helicopter parents. June and her clandestine boyfriend, Harry (Percelle Ascott), plan to run away and start afresh. Scarcely has the girl slid out the window when Steinar, promising a reunion with her mother, attempts to hustle her into the back of a van. The lovers escape, but June later shifts into his shape.
In a less stable relationship, this would be a deal-breaker. Indeed, the second episode begins with another chase: Harry is fleeing June, now played by Jóhannesson, who struggles to persuade him that she is herself. In their motel room, they huddle in front of a mirror, which reflects a shifter’s true identity. In time, June grows calm and gets back to her old self. Renewing their trust and resuming their flight, the lovers head to London, where June receives mentorship from one well-adjusted, self-controlled shifter, who explains their superhuman condition with reference to Old Norse mythology. Oh, why not? you think, having come far enough to see that “The Innocents” inhabits a level of fantasy where fabulous schlock and comic-book cliché are indispensable. I was still wondering whether it would be viable to describe June’s powers in terms of a hackneyed conundrum—is it a gift or a curse?—when her mother had cause to roar, “It’s not a gift. It’s a curse!”
When the action takes us to Norway, where pearlescent clouds conjure the sullenness of Scandinavian noir, “The Innocents” tends to grow maddeningly stagnant, as if the show had built in longueurs for the convenience of viewers itching to divert their attention to other screens. In England, where Harry and June find time for soul-searching chats on casual strolls while fleeing both Steinar and their parents, its easy tempo feels more purposeful. The series, created by Hania Elkington and Simon Duric, exults in lingering among the dreams and fears typical of coming-of-age tumult. It is standard for young people to imagine that one’s parents are Greek gods or pure-blood wizards, and more common yet for them to react with distress as their bodies change. Sulking thoughtfully, the show gathers durable themes of juvenile fantasy into an attractive package. Harry encourages June to escape with him into adulthood by saying, “Now we can be whoever we want to be.” The irony is garish: June can be anyone, but in a way that no one would want, in this fanciful evocation of adolescent moods and problematic magic.
Sourse: newyorker.com
