In short: The Children (2008)

A Christmas vacation in the snowy countryside with family and their respective offspring must have sounded like a good idea at the time for the characters in this movie. These people clearly haven’t seen as many indie movies about family meetings in – comparatively, this does take place in the UK – isolated spaces that turn into various kinds of psychological torture as I have. But then, these little family tensions do turn out not to be the biggest problems anyone will have, for the dear little ones seem to catch some sort of bug that turns them first apathetic, strange(r than children are anyway, so it’s perfectly believable the grown-ups don’t notice the danger of the situation) and eventually murderous. They also do seem to know a lot about the fine details of parental psychology as well as have had an internal crash course in murder physics.

While there is by now a number of infected-style horror movies in which children become rather nasty, and there has of course been a line of evil kid movies since at least the 50s, going as far with children as perpetrators or victims as you’d do with grown-ups is still something of a taboo in horror films, leaving much of the evil children of horror somewhat classier than many of their grown-up colleagues infected with demons or, as in the case of this film by Tom Shankland, a post-28 Days Later not-zombie virus.

There’s no classy reticence in Shankland’s film, however. Instead there’s a truly vicious yet also disturbingly child-like note to the killer kids here, their behaviour and attacks feeling unpleasantly believable and disquieting even to this childless viewer. I don’t want to imagine what some parents might make of it.

That sense of ruthlessness/viciousness/rawness really is the main thing the film has going for it after it has spent some time building the characters and their – only somewhat strained – relationships. That’s not because The Children is a stupid film, or a one trick pony, but because it is very effectively focussed on creating a mood of desperation and doom, efficiently dragging the audience into sharing the characters’ horrible situation on a raw emotional level.

The film uses a lot of tricks to never let the audience forget that these are indeed children, using their smallness and physical fragility in nearly every scene, and going for kills that turn perfectly typical strange kid behaviour threatening and violent.

In general, The Children tries to go for its audience’s jugular, using fast cuts, loud noises and some wonderfully horrible kid screeching and keening to stress a viewer out; and all that while using nary a typical jump scare. It’s too bad that Shankland hasn’t done much movie work after this, though he was involved in quite a bit of worthwhile series work for TV streaming.