Armand 2025 Movie Review Trailer

 Renate Reinsve, the protagonist of “The Worst Person in the World,” is a protective mother who comes under fire in Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel’s drama that leaves you perplexed.

There’s a very good scene in “Armand,” the first film written and directed by Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel, grandson of Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullmann. We’re inside an elementary school in Norway. Elisabeth, the mother of a student, has been summoned to the school to appear before a panel of teachers. 

Director: Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel
Writer: Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel
Stars: Renate Reinsve, Ellen Dorrit Petersen, Endre Hellestveit

She’s informed, bit by bit, that her six-year-old son, Armand (we never see him, or any other child, which is odd, since the entire film is about children), may have sexually abused one of his classmates. Because Elisabeth believes she has a well-adjusted son and that a six-year-old cannot be guilty of abuse of any kind, she looks at her interrogators with a look of skeptical contempt. And after being questioned about a series of microtransgressions that seem trivial to her, she starts laughing. In fact, she can’t stop laughing.

Elisabeth is played by Renate Reinsve, who reached a new peak of prominence with her performance in Joachim Trier’s “The Worst Person in the World.” The fit of laughter she subjects us to (which lasts about five minutes) is a show of acting bravura. She laughs again and again, and stops, and laughs again, as if the laughter is escaping from her veins and she can’t control it. Watching this, I began to think that laughing, for an actor, must be even harder than crying. How can you make it seem spontaneous? For minutes?

But the power of Reinsve’s performance has to do with where the laughter comes from. It’s a bitter, almost sarcastic laugh, with an undercurrent of disbelief that seems to say, “Are you kidding me?” She’s not just laughing at the idiocy of the questions she’s been asked, but at the very idea of ​​living in a society that has decided to subject behavior to this degree of control. That’s why her laughter doesn’t stop. The revelation—the sheer horror—that drives her fit of laughter keeps hitting her, at ever deeper levels. Reinsve, unlike the film’s director, doesn’t have a famous cinematic legacy, but what she does in this scene made me think of the great Liv Ullmann.

The rest of the film made me think that coherence—of story, theme, vision—may be a fading value.

“Armand” has an interesting premise (a mother questioned about her son’s behavior as a vehicle for an exploration of social values). But the film, though elegantly photographed, is mostly a mess. It throws things at you obliquely and randomly, and is constructed like an unsolvable puzzle. Ingmar Bergman became the icon of 20th-century intellectual cinema, but Bergman, for all the grandeur of his scope, wrote dialogue that could suck an audience in like a whirlpool. Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel, on the other hand, manages to create a “conversation” so terse and elliptical that it sounds like the coded staccato of late-era David Mamet, written by someone who was doing several things at once.

Ullmann Tøndel doesn’t know how to follow a scene through to the end. Again and again, he leaves us in suspense, and most of what happens is blatantly unbelievable. Why does the panel questioning Elisabeth do so in a classroom instead of an office? Given the gravity of what could have happened, why don’t they just tell her what the charge is instead of beating around the bush for 45 minutes? The person overseeing the panel is an inexperienced young teacher, Sunna (Thea Lambrechts Vaulen), who is very much in trouble. But if one of the essential points of the film is that Norwegian culture has become fanatical about its caution, why would she be put in charge? As details of the incident come to light, it is discovered that Armand’s accuser, a 6-year-old boy named Jon, claims he was raped. But, as Elisabeth points out, this seems highly unlikely behavior (or language) for a 6-year-old boy.

As if the situation weren’t fraught enough, Ullmann Tøndel piles on connections and layers of trauma between the characters. Elisabeth and Sarah, Jon’s mother, are sisters-in-law. (But, somehow, we’re not told this for a long time.) Thomas, the man who connects them, was Sarah’s brother and Elisabeth’s husband; he committed suicide. (Sarah blames Elisabeth.) The fact that so much is said about people we never meet is frustrating. And the way old photographs of several of the characters, taken when they were students at the school, are displayed in the hallway gives some moments in the film a creepy but oddly gratuitous “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” feel. Even a recurring bloody nose seems sinister. 

Watch Armand 2025 Movie Trailer