Little girls are crawling all over the film section this week—there’s Lyra in The Golden Compass and Briony in Atonement and Japanese teenagers in Honey and Clover (the last is, unfortunately, not opening this week after all; Grand Illusion is still closed for roof repairs). I’m working on This Weekend at the Movies now, but first I wanted to mention the entire population of little girls in my DVD column, about Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s beautiful Innocence.

Innocence, the astounding feature film debut from French director Lucile Hadzihalilovic, feels as though it should begin as stories do—with “once upon a time,” like the click of a latch in the door to the imaginary. Instead, it starts with a menacing rumble. There’s the rush of a waterfall and then the subterranean roar of a train, the universal sign for a European boarding school.

But this school, surrounded by woods and a wide brick wall, is located in a parallel world. A little girl named Iris (Zoé Auclair) is delivered, in a coffin, to one of five houses. An older girl unlocks her and she is dressed and given colored velvet ribbons for her hair. The other girls, who are wearing different colors in their pigtails, from red for the youngest to violet for the oldest, all untie their ribbons and trade them up for the next color of the rainbow. Iris is introduced to the school (ballet classes, rhythmic gymnastics, natural history) and its baroque customs (every year, the most appealing of the blue ribbons is selected by the headmistress to leave the school early). Nothing is explained.

Critics have complained that Hadzihalilovic’s vision of a little sensualist convent will draw pedophiles like flies, but the film is clearly told from the point of view of the girls themselves: It’s suffused with an unmistakable dread. The most alert students make desperate escape attempts. Others retreat into familiar forms of little-girl psychological revolt: Selma (Alisson Lalieux) is sullen and staring, feeding off some unseen internal fury; pudgy Rose (Astrid Homme) undulates with her hula hoop, her eyes giving away a cunning awareness of her own budding appeal. Hadzihalilovic anticipates the pedophilia question in more complex ways as well: Her movie plays up the creepiness of quasi-legitimate cultural hang-ups, like the smoothness of little girl legs. (I’m reminded of Lewis Carroll’s inscription on one of his infamous photographs: “Pretty little legs/Paddling in the waters/Knees as smooth as eggs/Belonging to my daughters.”) The source material, a novella by Frank Wedekind, has been called prescriptive, a protofascist recipe for how girls should actually be taught. In Hadzihalilovic’s hands, it’s a horror story of the subtlest kind.

Here’s the Lewis Carroll picture in question. Talk about little-girl psychological revolt.

If you’re as intrigued by this movie as I am, you’ll want to read occasional Stranger contributor Michael Atkinson’s great review of the DVD over at IFC.com. Also noteworthy: One of the teachers in the film is played by Marion Cotillard, who’s an Oscar contender this year for La Vie en Rose (aka La Môme). She’s gorgeous, and it’s great to see her playing someone slightly sinister.