RETRO ACTIVE: Who Can Kill a Child? (1976)
by Nick Schager 
What's new is always old, and in this recurring column, I'll be taking a look at the classic genre movies that have influenced today's new releases. In honor of Lynne Ramsay's creepy-kid drama We Need to Talk About Kevin, this week it's Narciso Ib��ez Serrador's cult classic Who Can Kill a Child? Violence is a dangerous inheritance in
Who Can Kill a Child?,
Narciso Ib��ez Serrador's haunting 1976 horror story about childhood malice and adults' compromised response to it. Based on Juan Jos� Plans' novel, and spiritually emulated a year later by
Stephen King's
Children of the Corn, Serrador's film opens with a grim newsreel-montage credit sequence of atrocities from WWII, the India-Pakistan and Nigerian civil wars, and Korea and Vietnam, with a narrator and onscreen text taking great pains to lay out the hundreds of thousands of kid casualties in each conflict. That downbeat intro provides underlined thematic context for the ensuing story, which turns to happily married English couple Tom (
Lewis Flander) and pregnant Evelyn (
Prunella Ransome), who, on vacation in Spain without their two children, decide to visit the remote island of Almanzora where Tom had once travelled 12 years earlier. Tom and Evelyn are outsiders?Evelyn cornily keeps asking Tom to define Spanish words like "pi�ata" and "gracias"?but, more to the point, they're adults, and their early discussion of a
La Dolce Vita character's belief in killing children to spare them from their parents' mistakes not so subtly foreshadows the ethical dilemma they'll soon face.
After renting a boat?and following a hilarious aerial shot-to-transitional fade that abruptly skips the plot ahead four hours?Tom and Evelyn arrive at Almanzora, where they're greeted at the dock by children whose silence is more than a bit strange. Stranger still is that the nearby town seems deserted, and recently. Though Tom and Evelyn don't immediately link this discovery with the earlier news of bodies recently washed ashore on the mainland, Serrador's patience during these early passages is unnerving, allowing tension to build at a riveting slow-boil. The director's expert pacing is matched by his keen compositional eye, as evidenced by an ankle-level pan across a market floor that follows Tom's feet on the other side of an aisle while passing by a foreground corpse that goes unseen by the tourist. That visual panache continues throughout
Who Can Kill a Child?, which utilizes low, upturned camera angles to unsettling effect (especially a later shot of a woman standing in front of a mountainside teeming with encroaching villains), as well as finds a consistently suspenseful balance between hectic chase sequences and moments of quiet dread. Those latter passages are the film's lifeblood, melding sparkling sunshine and interior daytime shadows to create an eerie sense of malevolence lurking on the edges of cheerful, seemingly innocent beauty.
An encounter with a young girl who touches Evelyn's baby (an act that directly factors into the finale) merely increases the couple's confusion, but the true reality of their circumstances isn't long in coming, as shortly thereafter Tom and Evelyn witness a smiling blonde girl beat an old man to death with his own cane, a murder whose terror is amplified by Serrador's decision to keep all physical contact off-screen (the man hidden behind a corner, and only the girl visible as she repeatedly strikes him). Stunned, Tom takes the man's body to a barn and, once outside to have a smoke to ease his nerves, hears the youthful laughter and chatter that peppers the film's soundtrack and embodies its horror. Peeking back inside, he witnesses a group of kids playing pi�ata with the man's corpse, wielding scythes to strike his body in a scene of escalating close-ups of laughing faces, swaying bodies, and blood. The madness of the situation confirmed, Tom and Evelyn proceed to frantically make their way from one point of the island to another in hopes of escaping, all while dealing with a mysterious phone caller, a surviving adult with too much trust in his daughter, and a paradise locale overrun by kids whose robotic evil seems the result of some sort of infectious group psychosis.
Serrador offers no definitive explanation for why the island's kids have gone loco, though as his prologue suggests, their behavior appears to be a sudden, communal response to cultural and political brutality perpetrated by the old against the young. Regardless of such motivations, however,
Who Can Kill a Child? eventually turns on its titular question, with the issue of what constitutes an appropriate response to these mini-psychos coming to a head in a jail cell where a little boy wielding a pistol forces Tom to confront his own stomach for violence. Serrador's staging of this sequence is amazingly assured, culminating in two climaxes?first with a shot of blood dripping down a white wall, and then of Evelyn's teary-eyed face as she collapses to the floor, the victim of a shrewdly scripted, decidedly creepy narrative twist. From there, it's just a race to the desperate, amoral bottom, as Tom is forced into skull-smashing straits and, with the arrival of coast guardsmen, is ultimately doomed by cultural preconceptions about the innocent nature of children. The message is clear: beatific smiles and playful demeanors to the contrary, kids are merely nascent adults, and thus carry inside the capacity for the same brutal, vengeful heinousness as their elders. Or, rather: spare the rod or suffer the consequences.
Posted by ahillis at January 12, 2012 4:17 PM
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