Review of Beware of Children (2019)

Moving picture, 157 minutes

Seen in 2020.

A 13-year-old girl walks away from school, having struck a boy who later dies from his injury. Nobody heard what they were talking about.

Conspicuously aimless social realism. Despite the original title, Barn (“children”), only one of the characters is a child. It’s nothing like Shame (2015), focusing instead on adults.

There are scenes where the director paints a good picture of what adults would do following an ambiguous freak accident, but much more time is spent on awkward parodies of CYA bureaucracy and irrelevant character quirks, the sort of thing actors like to work out when the script isn’t driving them anywhere.

moving picture fiction