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Armand Movie Review

Armand is a 2024 Norwegian thriller drama film directed by Halfdan Ullmann Tondel and starring Renate Reinsve. It’s a very messy movie.

When Elisabeth gets called to a parent-teacher conference, she’s presented with scathing allegations that trigger a tangled web of accusations between parents and faculty. This movie was directed by a grandson of Liv Ullmann and Ingmar Bergman and it’s a clear case of nepotism that I continue to find frustrating. This debut was honored at Cannes, but I find his directing to be problematic and not great at all.

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This is the type of movie that becomes worse and worse as it goes along. This is because the basic premise is a solid one and all the director had to do was just execute it in a straightforward fashion, but of course nowadays being edgy and original will get you more attention than just being good and competent, so this is what he decided to do, which paid off for the critics, but not for the viewers.

Armand has a pretty good first act that has strong dialogue, interesting themes and excellent acting performances. I wouldn’t call this performance from Renate Reinsve better than the superb one she gave in ‘The Worst Person in the World’, but she was still very good here and by far the best thing about this entire movie.

But the movie became insufferable from then on. This is where the director suddenly decided to be authentic, which he succeeded at I guess, but at the cost of coherence and appeal. The interpretive dance sequences were laughably bad and just pointless. They did nothing for me and they also did nothing for the story that simply did not need it. The cinematography is very good and its setting is definitely well utilized, but the editing, directing and structure were all bafflingly poor.

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