ARMAND. A Derailed Psychodrama [REVIEW]

It’s long been known that Scandinavian cinema excels at confrontations like few other global film industries. Time and again, we’ve seen characters from this region’s films clash in extremely uncomfortable situations, confronting emotions that we usually try to keep hidden. This is also the case in Armand by Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel, a Norwegian film that won the Golden Camera at Cannes this year, awarded to the best debuts. In this densely woven psychological drama, we are quickly thrown into an unpleasant confrontation, with the well-being of two young boys at stake.

The titular Armand is a first-grade student accused of crossing moral boundaries in his play with Jon, one of his closest friends. Armand is the son of Elizabeth (played by the currently in-demand Renate Reinsve, known from The Worst Person in the World), whom we meet in the film’s opening scene, speeding her Volvo to a school meeting organized with Jon’s parents. The speed of Elizabeth’s car suggests she is driven by strong emotions. No wonder – a mysterious summons to the school concerning one’s child is a highly stressful situation for any parent. In Tøndel’s film, it’s almost like a Hitchcockian scenario, as the dynamic opening sequence is just the prelude to a true concert of emotions that will unfold in the school room adorned with colorful artworks. The subject of the meeting, led by the young and somewhat clumsy teacher Sunna (Thea Lambrechts Vaulen), turns out to be an incident as serious as it is rare among such young children.

Armand takes the form of a cinematic psychodrama, where parents confined in a small space are forced to confront each other, their perceptions of their children, and their own parenting methods and mistakes. The context of the entire situation deepens and broadens with each minute – we learn more about Armand’s family situation and the specifics of his relationship with Jon.

We observe the starkly different reactions of Elizabeth and Jon’s parents (played by renowned Norwegian actors Ellen Dorrit Petersen and Endre Hellestveit), as well as the unfortunate, scandal-avoidance-driven actions of the school staff, led by a somewhat clueless principal and a better-prepared psychologist. The faculty in Armand also serves as a main source of comic relief, despite the immense emotional weight of the children’s incident. Tøndel wisely included humorous elements, preventing the story from overwhelming the audience and allowing a more detached view of the characters’ behaviors.

However, while the initial concept of Armand and some plot decisions are defensible, the 34-year-old director fails to maintain narrative discipline. The first act of the story grips like the best thrillers, keeping the audience on the edge of their seats. Yet after one of the most surprising scenes, unbearably prolonged and caricatured, Armand painfully derails, losing pace and narrative clarity.

The meticulously built tension, arising from accumulating emotions, gives way to impressionistic scenes that disrupt the promising structure and disorient the viewer. By then, it becomes clear that regardless of how Tøndel concludes his film, the ending will not be satisfying. The initial confrontation will not find an effective resolution, and the whole will end up as a kind of cinematic mess rather than an attempt to interestingly depict contemporary social conflicts.

It’s a shame, because there was room to ask important questions: what constitutes harm, where certain behaviors in the youngest members of society originate, how to distinguish truth from lies, and how to verify them. And while it seemed Armand was a great film material to attempt answering these pressing questions, Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel limited himself to posing questions without effectively and accurately closing this promising debut.