If you saw the DVD case for Tom Shankland's The Children and passed it by after assuming it was just another direct-to-DVD flick in the vein of Children of the Damned or Cronenberg's The Brood, I couldn't fault you. When I first heard of the film roughly a year ago, that was my reaction as well. I've nothing against films that use evil children as a plot device, but the feeling of familiarity that pulsed through the premise made it hard to get excited about the project. And while Shankland's film does tread the same ground as the aforementioned films (and countless others featuring antagonistic children), the filmmaker (who also wrote the script) is skilled enough to make the end result far more interesting than you've probably imagined.

The Children finds two yuppie British families spending the holidays together at a remote countryside home. They're all friendly, but you get the feeling there's tension in the air between them. One family features a wife and her new husband (who hasn't been able to exert his authority over his stepchildren) along with a petulant teenaged daughter and two younger kids. The other couple has children of their own and their own unique set of issues (including a husband who seems a little more interested than he should be in his teenaged niece...). These potential domestic problems will be the least of everyone's worries, though, because as the film moves along things start to get weird-and the children morph from happy kids to bloodthirsty savages with a burning desire to kill anyone older than they are.

The Children may not be the most original idea under the sun, but it does manage to entertain in spite of the fact that we've seen most of what it has to offer countless times before. There are a number of reasons for why this happens, including Shankland's stylish direction, decent performances from the ensemble cast, and a willingness on the film's part of leave things ambiguous at times and break taboos in its handling of children.

Shankland's direction is one of the film's strongest points. The director has a keen eye for visual composition, capturing the setting of the film in such a perfect way that it becomes a foil to what's happening in the narrative. In most other films of this type, at least some of the action would occur at night, in the darkness. This doesn't happen in The Children. Instead, Shankland shoots the bulk of the film in daylight-with the blindingly white backdrop of a landscape covered with snow making every detail stand out even more. Because of this decision, there aren't any obvious visual cues for the audience to lock in on and know that they should start worrying. When everything happens in the light of day (a time that's generally safe in genre films), the impact resonates all the more. Plus, the white backdrops make a great contrast to all the ruby red blood that's eventually spilled.

Shankland has crafted a film that builds slowly, wringing maximum tension out of each shot, each sequence, and the entire film as a whole. The Children isn't a scary film-it's one marked more by an ever-present sense of unease. This is only exacerbated by the fact that Shankland doesn't appear to be even remotely concerned with why the children have gone murderous. The events in The Children are happening-there's no time to figure out why when your kids are trying to gouge your eyes out. Because of this, a lot of the latter parts of the film play out in a way that runs contrary to what a typical audience would expect. There's no moment where everyone figures out why this is happening or how to correct it. Instead it's just a fight for survival that forces the adults to make some very complicated and unpleasant choices.

The cast is comprised of actors who're unknown to American audiences, and that certainly helps with the suspension of disbelief. That each of them does an admirable job of playing the role they've been assigned is purely bonus. The film's real star is moody teenager Casey (Hannah Tointon), who straddles the line between childhood (and the inherent danger of succumbing to whatever's made the children crazy) and adulthood. There's probably some kind of deeper theme one can draw from the film when it comes to the Casey character and her being trapped between two distinct phases of her life, but I'm not making it. The Children works well enough as a straight up genre piece.

Once the film really gets rolling, Shankland has to make his most important decision of all: how do you deal with children who're murderous? The politically correct way of handling this would be that you eventually find some way to cure them and you definitely do not, under any circumstances, kill them-especially not on screen. Thankfully, Shankland doesn't seem to be remotely concerned with doing things the politically correct way. The Children does require a bit of a suspension of disbelief on the audience's part (after all, once the adults figure out something's off with the kids, they could just round them all up and lock them in a room. In the film's defense, it does do a pretty believable job of keeping the adults from actually figuring out what's happening until it's essentially too late to do anything about it), but it certainly doesn't shy away from showing bad things happening to the murderous children. It's refreshing to see a filmmaker not wimp out on something like this.

The Children gets a lot of things right, but it's not perfect, unfortunately. The film's ending is pretty obvious from the early stages and arrives right on schedule. This is even more disappointing than it might have been because Shankland and crew have done such a nice job of subverting expectations up until this point that I kept hoping they'd surprise me here as well. They don't, and it's a letdown. Yes, there's an air of ambiguity about the film's final shots, but anyone who couldn't have guessed this was how the film might conclude from the early moments hasn't watched very many films, apparently. It never seems fair to dock a film a bunch of points for an unsatisfying ending when everything else that came before it was good, but endings are important-they're the last thing we see of a film, and that final impression is what sticks with us as we walk away from the experience. That being said, The Children makes for a decent rental and will almost assuredly be the brightest spot in this year's Ghost House Underground DVD releases. It's not a film that breaks any new narrative ground, but it should keep most horror fans entertained.

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Good for a Rainy Day