THE CHILDREN

During Christmas Eve, two families meet to spend a short period together in a mountain cabin amidst the snow. The children of the two couples are happy and play together, as well as with their parents, until a particular virus deprives people of all forms of rationality, leading them to violent acts and a strong murderous instinct, not affecting the youngest child. Little by little, all the little children become infected, the parents will find themselves fighting for their own survival, threatened by their own adorable children. When a new and deadly virus strikes the earth, it is logical that the first to have a weak and still underdeveloped immune system would be the children. It is precisely from here that the British director Tom Shankland departs to tell the story of two happy little families who are persecuted and torn apart by their small children. No natural disasters, no demons or dark forces, but a "simple" and inevitable virus that triggers the murderous madness of this "The Children", where what is presented to us is a much more serious and complicated theme than expected, as at the base of all this is an unlikely but difficult question: would you kill your children to save your life, even if they are already ten years old? And to save other children or other people? Shankland's film finds its strength here, but also its weakness, as the question seems well articulated at first, although with some gaps in the development of the relationships between some characters, to then be a bit lost from sight. The children are eliminated with too much ease, with the awareness that they have become malicious and incurable in very little time, after which the only solution found, without considering others, is to kill them without reserve. It is hard to believe that a mother would reach such meanness, even with post-murder crying. That said, "The Children" is still an excellent film in many aspects. The plot is fluid and unsettling with the children losing all their human characteristics to become serial killer babies without any emotion or attachment to others, their parents first and foremost. Impossible not to think of the child in "Pet Sematary" or not to go back in memory to the unsettling pargoles of "The Village of the Damned". Interesting the setting as well as the photography which, although not performing miracles, is well aligned with what is proposed on the screen. Apart from that, the special effects which, overall, reach sufficiency with some small gems like the brain of the man who is pushed already for the descent with the sled or the broken leg in the park. Rare meanness is also reserved for the children who, although they are the perpetrators of the film, will be those to suffer the worst fates in the worst ways without anything being spared visually. Cute but predictable the ending. Small note regarding the cast which not only proposes good actors in the role of the parents of the five children (with the exception of the not very expressive Stephen Campbell Moore), where Eva Birthistle stands out in the role of the "heroine" mother, but we have children all but irritating or beyond decency (as many films propose to us) who do, in fact, their job commendably, proving better than the adults themselves and on several occasions quite unsettling. "The Children" is a film that wants to be more than a simple "virus movie" but would have been more credible in this sense if it had chosen to sacrifice some violent scenes for something more subtle and psychological. It entertains and amuses very well, however.