In Armand, the feature debut from Halfdan Ullmann Tondel – grandson of Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullmann – an emergency parent-teacher conference bubbles into an unnerving psychological crucible.
It’s an improbable hellscape. The film, set within the bland, institutional corridors of a Norwegian primary school, chronicles a single afternoon that stretches into a surreal purgatory of suspicion, guilt and (finally) something like the compellingly demented choreography of Climax, Gaspar Noé’s dance horror.
Renate Reinsve from The Worst Person in the World, never better than here, plays Elisabeth, a once-celebrated actor and now single mother, summoned to discuss a troubling, possibly sexual playground incident involving Armand, her six-year-old son.
She is met not only by Armand’s caring, anxious teacher but also by her in-laws, Sarah and Anders, parents of the allegedly assaulted Jon. The meeting quickly devolves into a witch hunt; in a grotesque, climactic scene, Elisabeth bursts into prolonged uncontrollable laughter.
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Such odd and inexplicable behaviours are sandwiched between gutting revelations.
Reinsve’s alternately steely, fragile performance is met with equal ferocity by Ellen Dorrit Petersen, from The Innocents, playing the heroine’s embittered, estranged sister-in-law.
A puzzled and ineffectual teaching staff watch on.
Pal Ulvik Rokseth’s cinematography adds claustrophobic weight to labyrinthine passages and isolated nooks. Loud and performative adult insecurities and inadequacies eclipse any real concern for the children they claim to defend.
In this spirit the offending (and accusatory) children remain off-camera.
As the meeting splinters into sidebars, whispered menace and stylised interludes dilute the impact of the initial pressure-cooker setting.
But even when they demand a bigger leap of faith, Tondel directs these allegorical flourishes with confidence and verve. One scene finds Elisabeth in a two-step with a janitor; another renders a near-biblical judgment at a wordless parental gathering in the pouring rain.
These sequences coalesce into an indelible, unsettling debut, one that rightly won the Caméra d’Or for best first feature at Cannes film festival in 2024.
In cinemas from Friday, July 11th
