One thing young adult fiction has taught us is that teenage romance can overcome even the most powerful supernatural forces. Is your beloved a vampire, a werewolf, a zombie, a post-apocalyptic freedom fighter? Not to worry, because young love will conquer all. And yet, while the teens in the new Netflix series The Innocents (premiering August 24) face similar obstacles, their insipid and frequently annoying love for each other proves stronger than the sinister and mysterious forces working against them.
Sixteen-year-olds June (Sorcha Groundsell) and Harry (Percelle Ascott) make an elaborate plan to run away together, escaping June’s overbearing stepfather John (Sam Hazeldine) and their gloomy, dead-end English town, but they fail to take into account one key element: June is what’s known as a “shifter,” with the ability to take on other people’s forms when she touches them in moments of agitation, leaving the person she copies in a sort of vegetative state. June, of course, doesn’t know this about herself when she runs off to be with the love of her life, but her and Harry’s escape triggers a manhunt from multiple interested parties, including the mysterious Dr. Halvorson (Guy Pearce), who’s been studying shifters for his own, possibly nefarious, ends.
RELATED REVIEW: Jack Ryan Returns… for Generic Superspy Adventures
The slowly paced show takes a while to make all those connections clear, though, and all it has at first is June and Harry’s all-encompassing love, which is enough for them to disrupt their entire lives and cut off contact with their families, even before they know about June’s condition. Their melodramatic romance, which lurches from intense lust to harsh recriminations and back in each episode, is tiresome by the end of the first episode, and they’re almost always making dumb choices in their efforts to evade capture (nearly every time they run away from a seemingly safe situation gone wrong, they hastily leave all their belongings behind).
The mythology behind the shifting phenomenon is slightly more engaging, although it’s cobbled together from a lot of familiar sci-fi and supernatural tropes. While the shifters take on the physical form of the people they copy, for some reason they still appear as themselves in mirrors, which is handy visual shorthand for character identification, but makes no sense in relation to the pseudo-scientific explanation of the condition.
RELATED REVIEW: Netflix’s Insatiable Is Misguided, Unpleasant and Unfunny
At his remote farm in Norway, Halvorson is treating a few other women who are also shifters, helping them get their ability under control (or is he?). This is the kind of show that has a character yell, “It’s not a gift! It’s a curse!” when confronted about her supernatural ability, and the show’s treatment of superpowers is full of similar clichés. June would fit right in with mutants on the run from the government, and the various figures who claim they can help her harness her powers (including Halvorson, June’s stern stepfather, and a hedonistic fellow shifter who shows up in the second half of the season) are all familiar character types.
Page 2: [valnet-url-page page=2 paginated=0 text='The%20Innocents%3A%20There%20Is%20A%20Villain...%20Eventually']
With its female-dominated cabal of genetic misfits, its competing shady factions and its sometimes rudimentary production values (nearly every shapeshifting moment occurs off-camera), The Innocents is a bit reminiscent of Orphan Black, although Groundsell is certainly no Tatiana Maslany, despite her generally appealing performance. Instead of one actor playing multiple characters, The Innocents has multiple actors playing the same character, as June shifts into different people at moments of crisis, at first unable to control or understand her abilities.
Ascott is much less appealing as the whiny, insecure Harry, and as the season goes on, he seems less and less essential to the story. Harry’s police detective mother Christine (Nadine Marshall) is investigating a case with ties to the shifters, but her connection doesn’t have the same urgency as the pursuits led by June’s stepfather or by Halvorson and his henchmen. June and Harry drift from one would-be benefactor to another, always trusting the wrong people, in a narrative structure that gets repetitive very quickly.
RELATED REVIEW: Groening’s Disenchantment Sticks to Familiar Fantasy Tropes & Jokes
The lovers-on-the-run story proceeds parallel to the story of Halvorson’s efforts at his isolated compound, where June’s mother Elena (Laura Birn) is one of the patients. Pearce balances paternal concern with obvious ulterior motives in his portrayal of Halvorson, but his true goals remain opaque at least through the first five episodes (of eight total), depriving the show of a true villain. Indeed, everyone seems to have June’s best interests at heart in one way or another, which makes the plotting more frustrating, since the problems could probably be solved if all the characters just got together and communicated, instead of keeping unnecessary secrets from each other.
Shot in England and in Norway (with several Norwegian characters who speak in their native language), The Innocents has an invitingly bleak look, conveying a seriousness that often doesn’t come across in the writing or the performances. Last year’s austere Norwegian supernatural thriller Thelma handled similar themes more effectively, making better use of its slow-burn storytelling and the vague, undefined powers of its heroine. The Innocents creators Hania Elkington and Simon Duric can’t seem to decide if they are making an atmospheric chamber piece or a YA-style supernatural teen romance, and they don’t quite succeed at either one.