Format: Blu-ray from Cortland Public Library on rockin’ flatscreen.
It’s good to have friends. As I make my way through the They Shoot Zombies list, the percentage of films that I can’t find gets a little bit higher with each film I watch. Up to today, Who Can Kill a Child? (or ¿Quién puerde matar a un niño? in the original Spanish) was the only movie I hadn’t seen in the top-200, and I couldn’t find it. I have a friend who is also a horror nerd and who happens to be a librarian...so she bought a copy for the library and gave it to me to watch even before it was checked in. Like I said, it’s good to have friends.
We had a running joke, calling this “the film we can’t name” until it showed up—it's not the kind of title you want to say out loud around children...or parents...or people. In the defense of the movie, this isn’t a film specifically about child murderers and the question it is asking is not seeking an answer in terms of actually naming people. There is a title drop in the film, and when it happens, the question is essentially a rhetorical one—what kind of person could do this?
It’s a relevant question because Who Can Kill a Child? is a film that has a story that you’ve likely seen before in one way or another. What happens when children turn murderous? Children of the Corn asks this. So do both versions of The Children, as does It’s Alive, The Other, Bloody Birthday, The Bad Seed and The Brood and many others. We like to tell ourselves that children are innocent, and they are. What we don’t like to tell ourselves is that children are also frequently immoral, or at least amoral, because they haven’t actually developed a morality. Kids don’t always know what’s wrong, and while you’d like to hope that they won’t murder someone just ‘cuz, amoral is amoral, after all.
We’re going to be introduced to our two protagonists, Tom (Lewis Fiander) and Evelyn (Prunella Ransome), who are on vacation awaiting the birth of their third child. It should be noted that we are introduced to them only after a short documentary film about the Holocaust and starving children around the world. Tom and Evelyn aren’t happy in the boisterous, noisy town they are in, so they decide to sail off to an island about four hours off the coast of Spain, an island Tom has visited before. They rent a motorboat and head off.
Things are strange when they get there. The island seems to be deserted of all adults, and there are only stone-faced children about. Slowly over time, we start to see that the children have turned homicidal. We see a few bodies, a girl suddenly attacking an old man, and at one point, children playing something like a piñata, only with a dead body and a scythe. Tom and Evelyn head to the other side of the island where the children have not yet been affected by whatever is happening, but we watch them become essentially infected simply through prolonged eye contact with the violent children.
The question asked by the title of the film becomes relevant when Tom and Evelyn are cornered by kids who are set on murdering them for no clear reason other than they appear to want to murder all of the adults on the island and Tom and Evelyn are still there. This is where we get to see Evelyn become one of the worst horror movie characters in history. Think of all of the horror movies you’ve seen and all of the bad decisions characters have made. That’s Evelyn, over and over again. In situations where it’s harm a child or get trapped, Evelyn votes for “get trapped” every single time.
It’s also worth noting that the title of the movie can be answered with a single word: Tom. While Evelyn seems willing to cry a lot and be killed by malicious children if it means not having to do anything, Tom is absolutely down with picking up a machine gun and firing bursts into a crowd of kids. Who can kill a child? Tom sure as hell can, and he’ll do it without any guilt. In fact, at one point, Tom kills a child, and literally saves both of them and Evelyn appears disappointed in him—not scared, not freaked out, but genuinely disappointed at his actions that just saved her life.
The truth is that the build is a bit slow. Tom and especially Evelyn take far too long to figure out what is going on. Tom learns it relatively soon (he sees the scythe-piñata combo), but even with evidence staring her in the face, Evelyn doesn’t want to act in any way to save herself or, really, her unborn child.
That’s my biggest complaint here. I like horror movies because they almost always give us protagonists who are easy to root for. I don’t want to be eaten by mutant slugs or impaled by a huge dude in a hockey mask, so I’m going to have some sympathy for the victims. With this, Evelyn seems like she’s just waiting around to die, and I don’t have a lot of sympathy for that.
Why to watch Who Can Kill a Child?: It goes where you think it will and beyond.
Why not to watch: Evelyn might make the dumbest choices of any horror movie protagonist in history.
