Armand

I haven't thought much of the films or performances of Norwegian star Renate Reinsve since her fantastic breakout role in Joachim Trier's The Worst Person in the World. But her latest turn in the feature debut of writer/director Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel is a real knockout. The film is set in a Norwegian elementary school after classroom hours on a rainy afternoon. Reinsve's Elizabeth, a statuesque actress and widowed single mom, is called in for a meeting with school staff and a set of parents she knows well. At issue is her 6-year-old son, Armand, who is accused of crossing boundaries against his best friend. No one witnessed the incident except for a janitor, a person of color who tellingly is never brought in to share his perspective. As the conversation progresses, tensions get heightened, but not exactly in the ways we might expect.

Tøndel is the grandson of Liv Ullmann and Ingmar Bergman—talk about heavy expectations for a nepotisme spedbarn—and the film touches on a few of his grandfather's favorite themes, like madness, self-deception, and obsession. The school setting and the way time unfolds in this picture are quite surrealistic. It doesn't all work. The school feels more like an abandoned building that's been taken over for a production of Sleep No More than a place where kids are actually being educated, and the out-of-time manner in which this parent-teacher meeting unfolds sometimes feels so disconnected from any tangible reality (even dream logic) that it undercuts the themes rather than reinforcing them. Still, in return, we get a number of unexpected sequences that we wouldn't find in a more grounded picture like The Hunt or The Teacher's Lounge. There is one sequence in which Reinsve's tour de force performance is so surprising and unsettling that it literally stops the show (in a good way). The finale is far too much of a pretentious cop-out for the picture to really resonate, but Armand is still thrilling in many ways, and Reinsve heads up a terrific cast that keeps us fully engaged.