Lucile Hadzhahlilovic’s Innocence begs comparison to the Harry Potter series, if only to distinguish her film, adapted from Frank Wedekind’s late 19th century novel about a secluded girl’s school, from its special-effects laden, cinematic sibling estranged over in Hollywood. The differences between the two may not as great as it would seem, and perhaps one of the only things that separates the two is that Hadzhahlilovic’s film is looked at as a piece of art-cinema and thereby criticized and interpreted at a different standard and for different reasons than the American series.

Given the fewer resources and more intellectually conceptual emphasis of Innocence, it is to the director’s credit that her film is no less magical than the Potter series, an effect rendered through slight fantastic details (woodland paths lit by warm street lights, mysterious underground grates, unexplained subterranean rumblings) and Benoît Debie’s spectacular nature photography, much of which is shot in an ethereal, dreamy day-for-night, eternal twilight. The look befits the tale, that of a school for girls emphasizing both the natural (frolicking in the school’s grounds, studying natural history) and the physical aesthetic ideal (namely in the teaching of ballet to the students). Surrounded by a gate-less wall, taught by only a handful of teachers and served by withered old women, the small school is supremely mysterious in its placid totalitarianism. Rumors abound about rules, punishments, and legends—an atmosphere reinforced by Hadzhahlilovic’s entrancement with idyllic photography of the schoolgirls quivering between the innocent and the creepy, and with disturbing touches like the unexplained origins of the girls, who get deposited at the school in coffins and mysteriously graduate to who-knows-where after a couple years.

A couple girls’ arcs are traced as Hadzhahlilovic continues to build the school up in environmental and emotional details, but purposely leaves its motives, means, or ends an abstraction. We follow a young initiate as she shudders with fear at the new surroundings but becomes quickly attached to the oldest girl in her household; and like anywhere else, the close quarters spark jealousies, fantasies, friendships, rebellions, and hopes. Though the child actors are uniformly excellent, the director keeps their plot lines far too simple, and leaving their school as an abstract creation—while advisable if the film had a rich story inside the complex’s walls—leaves the film with little to go on other than the intoxicating atmosphere of the unexplained. To be sure, the atmosphere is provocative, especially in the intrusions of the menace and awareness of violence and sexuality for these pre-pubescent girls. A caretaker’s cynical remark that the ballet students will be using their legs outside the school strikes a cord of social paranoia, and one both fears and hopes Hadzhahlilovic may push Wedekind’s scenario into a more concrete or elaborated-upon allegory. But whether it could have been as potent as Dogville or as silly as the The Village, the idea of a narrative payoff for Innocence is not important to the filmmaker, who deems it necessary to keep the audience as in the dark about the girl’s “education” as the young girls themselves are. Sadly, what is evoked with the film’s visual grace and intoxicating use of childhood mystery are eventually deadened by archetypal boarding-school stories which do not explore Wedekind’s interesting concept.