[6.9/10] *The Innocents* is a number of good scares in search of a better movie. Director Jack Clayton and his crew construct plenty of sequences that chill the spine, shots that make your skin crawl, and moments to make the hair on the back of your neck stand up. But the production is rife with overwrought performances, laughable dialogue, and a story that veers between lackadaisical to nonsensical, with occasional detours of being downright dull.

It’s the sort of film that would work better if all the lines were replaced with subtitles, or really just omitted altogether. Clayton and company do well at setting a mood, one where nothing is explicitly wrong, but it feels like some spectre might be lurking just around the corner. But all of that goes to pot once the governess or the housekeeper or the titular young brother in sister have some overblown reaction to it all that punctures the creepy atmosphere and devolves into rank melodrama.

Some of that is just the gulf of time proving itself impassable for someone born decades after this movie’s release. Deborah Kerr’s frantic, overly mannered delivery verges on the comical in places. It’s the sort of thing I can intellectually accept as a choice and the style of the time, but which simply can’t move me amid the rampant artifice of it all, and which undermines the other unsettling horror elements that make up the film.

Granted, Kerr and her fellow cast members are saddled with some truly ridiculous lines of dialogue. The feature is marbled with emotional exposition and flat declarations of what did or didn’t happen. When Clayton allows the film’s imagery and sound to take over, there’s an elegant, understated terror to the whole ordeal. But when any of the film’s central figures tries to comment on the proceedings, to describe their own state of mind, the whole thing falls apart into purple prose and unnatural speeches that, in my heart of hearts, I want to ascribe to William Archibald rather than Truman Capote.

Still, the performances are no great shakes. Kerr quivers and mawps and speaks ever so delicately about this and that. *The Innocents* largely rests on her shoulders, and her exaggerated reactions to everything, whether in delighted rapture or petrifying terror, render many, if not most, of the film’s high drama moments thoroughly unavailing. The same goes for the kids, who acquit themselves well enough for child actors (particularly Martin Stephens in the film’s last reel), but who more often come off as annoying or silly when the movie seems to be trying for creepy.

By the same token, in between its big scares, *The Innocents* is positively languid. The film plays understandably coy about what’s really going on with all the unnerving happenings around the country estate where Miss Giddens has been sent to look after her benefactor’s young niece and nephew. But it drags its feet between reveals, reducing itself to long, speculative exposition dumps, describing things the viewer’s already witnessed firsthand, and dull, elongated stretches.

And even when the film wants to put its cards on the table and try to convince the audience that the children are possessed by their deceased former governess and vallet, the reasons behind Miss Gibbons’s plans and rules for how to address it make little sense. Having decided that Miles and Flora are being controlled from beyond the grave, she decides that she simply needs to get them to admit that’s what’s happening or ferry them away from the manor and it’ll all go away. Maybe there’s some late 1800s ghost lore that just doesn't track with our modern mythos, and I’m willing to take the movie’s rules as a find them, but it still scans as an odd approach to a suspected haunting.

Granted, one of the films strengths is its ambiguity over whether the spooks and spine-tingling images we see through Miss Giddens’ eyes are real or the product of mental instability and delusion. For a production from a much more chaste era, *The Innocents* adds a psychological layer to its horror by lacing the film with the strain of repressed or abusive sexuality. On the one hand, it’s possible to read the film as a metaphor for child abuse, with Miss Giddens and Mrs. Grose trying to address (or sweep under the rug) horrors visited upon the children by their former caretakers, with our protagonist seeing an admission of what happened as the first step toward treatment and healing.

But on the other, it’s possible to read the entire ordeal as a mental unraveling of Miss Giddens, spurred by her own presumably repressed upbringing as the daughter of a country parson. There’s a tension in the film, between the sort of morally upstanding, prim and proper of Miss Giddens herself, and the combination of the Uncle’s “I’m too busy chasing skirts in London to look after my wards” position and the tale of the lascivious valet and governess who carried on their illicit affair while the children were aware. It’s not a far leap to take that tension, extrapolate it to a shock that a pair of children’s innocence would be corrupted by exposure to such licentiousness, and have that send Miss Giddens into a hallucinatory frenzy.

Still, whether her encounters with spooks and spirits are real or imagined, they’re the best part of the film. *The Innocents* is at its best when it’s not trying to make sense of its jumbled up plot, but rather trafficking in sheer chill factor. Cinematographer Freddie Francis finds engaging ways to block and frame Miss Giddens, often putting her in the foreground while one of her young chargers, a disquieting phantom, or simply a shadow lurks eerily in the background. It tracks that Francis would go on to work with David Lynch, as there’s a shared, unsettling dimension to how the film is shot and posed.

At the same time, the sound design firmly aids in the creep factor. Whether it’s the simple, quiet echo of Miss Giddens’s footsteps as she ascends a tower staircase, or the disturbing tunes sung in the din of the house, or the combinations of whispers and hums in heightened moments that add to the sense of dysphoria, the reason not to mute this film and just enjoy its sterling visuals is the way those aural components of the movie heighten its terror.

That’s the rub of *The Innocents*. When it simply wants to scare you, it uses all the tools in its toolbox with a virtuoso’s precision, culminating in a final act set piece that brings its slow bubbling horror to a frothing boil. But when it wants to convey character, or deliver important details, or simply convey what its major personalities are thinking or feeling, it resorts to cartoonish approaches in dialogue and delivery that weaken the audience’s ability to feel for anyone trapped in that well-constructed nightmare. There’s enough craft, and enough going on under the hood, to make the film worth watching and appreciating, but not enough of core components like character or performance or writing to make it truly great.