29/36
A 6-year-old boy, Armand, is accused of molesting his best friend in elementary school. Norway’s official entry for Best International Feature Film. 2025 at the 97th Academy Awards. Norwegian films tend to have a low international standard, but here we have a film that manages to reach an extremely low Norwegian standard. This is a rare achievement indeed. The film mostly looks like it was made by first-year film school students. These students set out to make an experimental film that was different from anything they’ve seen before, and they succeeded. But they forgot a few things. Among other things, they forgot that even bad film scripts usually have some tricks that keep the audience hooked until the end with some kind of cliffhanger or other cinematic technique. This film has none of those. It’s just incredibly bad. It’s also the cheapest film ever made. The cost is limited to the actors, the camera, the lighting and the sound crew, and no scene presents any technical challenges for anyone. If you’re strong enough to hold a camera and a microphone, you can make this movie. The movie takes place entirely in the hallways and rooms of a school. They didn’t even bother with sets. It’s a school, a county-run school, and they probably borrowed it for free. The actors don’t do a blatantly bad job. But it’s hard for actors to look completely bad – it takes a particularly bad director to make actors look bad. So, strictly speaking, it’s not the actors’ fault that the movie is terrible. But since they agreed to play the roles, their performance in Armand will be included in their filmography. It’s impossible to give the movie a 0, but if it were, it would have deserved it. 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 decided that this is the best film made in Norway this year. How they came to this conclusion is a mystery, considering there have been quite a few bad Norwegian films this year, but Armands is the worst. There are plenty of bad Norwegian films to choose from that are much better than this one. For those who don’t know, Norway has no internationally significant actors. By comparison, Sweden and Denmark have dozens. This film, with its trip to the US and Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film, shows the entire film industry that Norway is, for all practical purposes, a nation without a functioning film industry.