Elizabeth Anne Summers

Not surprisingly, as its graphic violence is perpetrated by (and eventually directed against) children, Who Can Kill a Child? was very controversial at the time of its release and even banned in several countries. While undeniably chilling, however, the film’s violence is neither gratuitous nor exploitative. It is in the service of a deeply serious meditation on the failure of the old in their moral responsibility to the young—a failure made clear by the movie’s prolog, which catalogues twentieth-century atrocities (the Holocaust and the Vietnam War among them) that, although engineered by adults, had a devastating impact on children. The film implies that the massacre of the old at the hands of the young should be viewed as an act not of senseless murder but of self-preservation.