THE CHILDREN (2008)

 

(Director/screenwriter: Tom Shankland. Screenplay based on Paul Andrew Williams’s story)

WARNING: POSSIBLE SPOILERS IN THIS REVIEW (if you’re new to the genre, really tired, and/or clueless).

CHILDREN, for the most part, is a great, intense, steady-build movie. The story, the pacing, the cinematography, the acting, the soundtrack, its shots (crosscuts, closeups and oddball-angles) work─Shankland’s script captures well the blind stupidity of adults, especially parents, when it comes to assuming children, even creepy-eyed f**kers who have been infected with a strange forest virus and are stabbing and assaulting people, deserve to be given the benefit of the doubt. It’s a relief when most of the adults die.

This is not film for those squeamish about violence against children. While CHILDREN is restrained and features mostly abstract, off-screen underage deaths, it may be traumatic for those sensitive to that sort of thing. There is big, effective use of blood (especially when snow is involved) in place of actual onscreen violence.

What ruined this otherwise spot-on flick for me was the plot-convenient, suddenly stupid f**k characters/plot-convenient-creatively-lazy “shock-twist” ending that does not ring true with the previously established logic and context of the virus and one of its key characters. This supposedly shock-twist ending, even for a sequel-courting work, was tired decades ago─surely Shankland and Williams, who penned a stellar story up until CHILDREN’s last three or four minutes, had the ability to come up with a sequel-hinting wrap-up that does not ending it with a ham-fisted thud?

I should acknowledge a deeper-read take on CHILDREN, given that the “virus” that infects the children is their unsaid realization that their parents have been lying to them about Christmas─and by extension, Santa Claus─and that their parents are something to mistrust, not emulate, given the pettiness, passive-aggressiveness and other negative traits of the adults. By extension, the finish (regarding the teenage daughter’s behavior near the end) fits on a thematic level, but it still feels like a bulls**t way to finish a movie, given that it easily could’ve swung another, less melodramatic way, given her previous behavior. If this take intrigues you, I highly recommend Andrea Subissati’s essay-chapter “Won’t Somebody Think of The Children?”, published in Yuletide Terror: Christmas Horror on Film and Television, edited by Paul Corrupe and Kier-La Janisse (published in 2017 by Spectacular Optical Publications), an overall excellent volume.

CHILDREN is a completely good film if you stop watching when two surviving, not-homicidal characters get in the car and begin driving away from the house where the spawn-enabled mayhem took place. Suggestion: when they see the crashed car and stop, turn it off.