Confined entirely to the after-hours hallways and classrooms of a Norwegian elementary school, Armand at first unfolds like a courtroom drama sans the courtroom. On one side is Elisabeth (Renate Reinsve), a high-strung actress who thunders through the hallways in heels that make her tower over the meek teacher, Sunna (Thea Lambrechts Vaulen), who acts as a mediator. On the other are the icy Sarah (Ellen Dorrit Petersen) and husband Anders (Endre Hellestveit), who allege that Elisabeth’s child, Armand, assaulted their son.
Shot on stark 16mm, Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel’s film slowly unfurls the details of a difficult situation careening toward a bureaucratic trainwreck. The school has no precedent to rely on, no procedures to consult. What follows is a clash of egos, the strangeness and ambiguity of the incident heightened by the fact that we never see the children at all.
Throughout, we only have secondhand information to go on and how it’s been filtered through preexisting tensions and institutional failure. Elisabeth pokes convincing holes in the events as relayed to her, and as Ullmann Tøndel’s film proceeds, it reveals further layers of (and somewhat contrived) resentment. But she’s far from an impartial observer—and with little context for how her son behaves at school, she’s nearly as in the dark as the audience.
And that’s before Armand gets weird. From the start, the film stokes tension with its peculiar sense of atmosphere, such as the way one scene orients the sea on the horizon in place of the sky. The school’s broken fire alarm blares every so often, and one of the administrators tries to power through recurring nosebleeds. But the film really goes for broke once Elisabeth breaks into peals of compulsive and inexplicable laughter, opening a floodgate of bizarre imagery: an ethereal choir of children with a familiar face at its center, a few interpretive dance routines.
Ullmann Tøndel, whose grandparents are Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullmann, whips up these odd flourishes without indulging in metaphoric horror. But as Armand gives itself over entirely to artsy eccentricity, he loses his grasp of the material. Its most fanciful sequences go on for far too long, and they communicate far too little information that isn’t already obvious from the writing or Reinsve’s convincing performance. The most charitable reading is that they’re grasping for deeper meaning and character complexity where there simply isn’t any. By the time we’re watching whole conversations be drowned out by noise of pounding rain, the abstract tendencies of Armand begin to feel like an act of unintentional self-sabotage.
Since 2001, we've brought you uncompromising, candid takes on the world of film, music, television, video games, theater, and more. Independently owned and operated publications like Slant have been hit hard in recent years, but we’re committed to keeping our content free and accessible—meaning no paywalls or fees.
If you like what we do, please consider subscribing to our Patreon or making a donation.
