Michael's Movie Grade: B
A flawed but engaging drama from Norway.
This movie has a very intriguing premise. It is about a meeting between school personnel and parents after one elementary school student is said to have sexually assaulted another. Yet it soon becomes obvious that there is something not right with this story. This story is simply a great and well written one that is immediately engaging. I became immediately invested and wanted to find out what the real truth was. The more information this film gives us, the more invested I became. The twists and turns in this story were smart and believable. All of this was of course helped by a great cast lead by Renate Reinsve, best known for her wonderful performance in The Worst Person in the World (2021). Her performance here is equally as great if not better. She brings a real humanity to this story that makes it hard not to care about her character.
Where this movie doesn't work as well is the surreal direction it takes at time. This movie tries to show the emotional state of our main character with surreal imagery, bizarre dance scenes and distortion of the soundtrack. Honestly this does not work at all. Such stylistic experiments should enhance the story and characters instead of distracting from them. This is not the case here. These scenes are poorly handled, often coming off as pretentious and heavy handed. They add nothing to the story and tell us nothing about the characters that we couldn't figure out from the more straightforward scenes. While this is still a very good movie, these scenes keep it from being the masterpiece it should have been.
This marks the feature film debut for director/writer Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel. Tøndel is the grandson of the great Swedish director Ingmar Bergman (one of my all-time favorite filmmakers) and the brilliant actress Liv Ullman. While this may not reach the heights of the best films from his grandparents it is still a good movie that is hopefully the start of a promising career.
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