Monday 9 October 2023

TV review: The Innocent, Netflix (2021)

This camp show has a lot going for it but it trips up in two places. One was the sex scenes with underage girls, which is just silly. You have these masked men leading these Lolicon clad chicks up a staircase in a dark warehouse. It’s supposed to be dreadful but it just looks dumb. There’s nothing sexy or cruel about the scene-making at this point, it looks like a bad theatre production.

The second place I got irritated was where they have a guy use a special implement to cut off a woman’s finger. Now I forgave the filmmakers for the Lolicon stunt but I couldn’t stomach this gratuitous violence. In one case they pull back from exposing too much that is real and in the second instance they go all out to make it as real as they can.

I didn’t object to how the flashbacks work, they add to the forward movement of the plot but it got to the point where all you got was flashbacks. The program is deeply conflicted, it doesn’t know whether it’s coming or going, probably the fault of the writers who were working from a novel. You can get away with much more in literature because you don’t have to show with actors what’s going on. Once you move from the page to the set you have to worry about breaking pornography laws, the medium is more immediate and less suggestive.

I gave up watching in episode seven, it runs to eight eps so I did pretty good but I couldn’t reconcile the disagreements between wish and reality. In the end I stopped watching in the middle of a flashback.


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