Innocence
2019 · 20m
Directed by Ben Reid
Tones: dark, provocative, tense
When a care-home worker falls to his death, a detective questions a young resident with Down syndrome who was spotted at the scene, and uncovers a crime more shocking than anyone imagined.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Most crime procedurals genuflect to the detective's intelligence; this one flips the script entirely by making the vulnerable witness the moral axis—it's a premise that should feel cheap but Reid actually commits to the subversion, and the result is genuinely unsettling in ways that consensus thrillers could never touch.
Reid demonstrates formal control in how the film withholds and deploys information, each interrogation scene tightening the screws with the precision of a well-made procedural, though the moral architecture—suspect-as-scapegoat—risks collapsing under its own provocation without the rigor of character development to anchor it.
The decision to play the entire investigation through the detective's assumptions rather than omniscient editing creates an economy of perspective that forces the audience into complicity; that single structural choice transforms what could be exploitation into something almost uncomfortably pointed.