Amazing. Not for all tastes, to be sure, but infinitely intriguing and accomplished. Great movie. After all the previous not totally successful, or barely watchable or downright awful fantasy movies that have come out of France in the last five years or so, French cinema turns out to be capable of producing an intelligent, beautiful, original work of art with its roots in the fantasy field which is both a treat to the eye and intelligence, and a graphically arresting piece of movie making. The film, dealing with strange ongoings at a remote boarding school for young girls in a mystery-ridden forest somewhere, is incredibly catching, full of hypnotic images. It is indeed closer to the spirit of silent movies, in particular the German school of Fritz Lang, Murnau, Pabst, etc, than to most modern movies. But so brilliant and respectful in its approach that it soon makes you forget its origins. The are dreamlike visions by the dozen in Innocence, superior or equal to Lynch's best films, to Jackson's Heavenly Creatures, or to Jane Campion's cinema in its finer moments, for instance. A painter in terms of framing and composition, the director is always lifting the material up into poetry country. See it and you will not be left untouched. Few films ever reach that kind of weirdness and movie magic. It has no comparison. Really.
