40/24
Armand, a 6-year-old boy, is accused of crossing the line against his best friend in elementary school. Norway’s official search for “Best International Feature Film”; For the 97th Oscars in 2025. Norwegian films are usually on a low international level, but we have a film that manages to reach an exceptionally low Norwegian level. That is a rare feat indeed. The film mostly looks like it was made by first-year film school students. These students set out to create an experimental film that has never been made before, and they succeeded. However, they forgot a few things. Among other things, they forgot that even bad films usually have a few tricks in the script that keep the viewer engaged until the end with some cliffhangers or other cinematic techniques. This film doesn’t have them. It is just exceptionally bad. Moreover, it is undoubtedly the cheapest film ever made. The costs are limited to the actors, the camera, the lighting and sound crew, and there are no technical problems for anyone in any scene. If you are strong enough to hold a camera and a microphone, you can make this film. The entire film takes place in the hallways and rooms of the school. They didn’t even bother with sets. This is a school, a county school, and they probably rented it for free. The actors don’t do a bad job. But it’s hard for actors to act completely bad – it takes an extremely bad director to make actors look bad. So, strictly speaking, it’s not the actors’ fault that the film is terrible. But since they agreed to take on the roles, their film history belongs to their performance in Armand. It’s impossible to give the film a 0, but if you did, it would deserve a 0 simply because it doesn’t deserve a 1. By the way, this is Norway’s contribution to this year’s Oscars. The Norwegian Oscar committee has decided that this is the best film made in Norway this year. How they came to this conclusion is a mystery, given that there have been quite a few bad Norwegian films this year, but Armand is the worst. There are plenty of bad Norwegian films to choose from that are far better than this one. For those who don’t know, Norway has no internationally significant actors. By comparison, Sweden and Denmark have a few dozen. This film, coming to the US and nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, shows the entire film industry that Norway is, in many practical ways, a nation without a functioning film industry.
