Review: Lost Children
by Elena Lazic
- Belgian director Michèle Jacob finds an original way to illustrate the lasting effects of childhood trauma in her fiction feature debut
Four children alone in a big house, surrounded by a thick forest that doesn’t want to let them through, where monsters seem to lurk and a dark burrow makes all who look into it lose hours in a split second – Lost Children [+see also:
trailer
interview: Michèle Jacob
film profile], the fiction feature debut by Belgian director Michèle Jacob, may sound like a sombre fairy tale, a delightfully gothic story set in a world more magical than our own. Premiering in the Proxima Competition at this year’s Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, the film instead creates its own rules and atmosphere, a combination of realism and horror that is built on chilling childhood fears and paralysing anxieties, rather than on allegorical and escapist fantasies.
Upon waking up in their big countryside house, Audrey (Iris Mirzabekiantz) and her siblings realise that their father has left, without any indication as to when he might return. This is hardly cause for alarm, and the kids decide to play hide-and-seek. Crouching in the corridor, Audrey is suddenly startled to hear an indistinct child’s voice behind a wall. The game is ruined, Audrey’s brother Gilles (Louis Litt Magis) rolling his eyes at what a “chicken” she is being, and Alex (Liocha Mirzabekiantz), the eldest, immediately switching to the caregiver role she will continue to occupy as the children progressively realise that their father isn’t coming back. Jacob, who also wrote the film, nicely unveils the distinct personalities of the children as they interact with one another and react to their new circumstances. It initially seems as though Audrey will be the only one to see unexplained, supernatural phenomena, and it is a scary development when the others do, too. Alex and Gilles both realise there is no way to leave the forest, while the more aloof Yannick (Lohen Van Houtte) keeps a blank expression even as his notebook later reveals that he has seen the same things as his twin sister Audrey.
Portrayed neither as the small adults of Hollywood movies, nor as the blissfully unaware and naive characters of safer, more commercial work, these children are somewhere in between: adults in the making. The spectre of adulthood that hovers over them is underlined by the fact that they have to take care of themselves: they ration their food, entertain and take care of each other, and finally decide to do something about the unexplained events that affect them all more and more frequently. Adulthood, as they are forced to experience it, is about taking responsibility, but also about facing their fears: scene after scene shows the kids trying to be brave when confronted with a disturbing vision. If they only shut their eyes tight and block their ears during the first few such encounters, they later stop hiding and decide to face whatever mystery keeps taunting them.
The structuring absence of both parents further paints adulthood as a terrible weight and mystery. It’s a genuinely intriguing story, and Jacob constructs the script well, never losing our interest as we get closer to finding out what is really happening. Is the film an allegorical representation of the way children inherit their parents’ trauma? In a way, but not only — that is just the part of the mystery it is easiest to guess. The full explanation relies on a bit of science fiction, but Jacob thankfully keeps the setup simple enough not to distract from the emotional directness of the entire enterprise. What does undermine it slightly is the film’s ending, with some of the final scenes needlessly reiterating the same point long after the implications of the situation have been made clear. The sometimes-overbearing score also feels superfluous. But Lost Children remains an overall successful and imaginative work that evokes well the helplessness and terror felt in transitional moments of childhood, as well as the immense bravery needed, from children and adults alike, to truly face reality.
Lost Children was produced by Belgium’s Velvet Films.
