It’s hard to imagine that in the world of childhood education–a profession filled with a ceaseless parade of thankless tasks–there would be any more thankless or inherently awkward than getting into the middle of a dispute between parents over the behavior of their children. Teachers and school administrators walk a delicate line, chained in place by political pressure and societal expectation, trying to both please everyone and remove themselves personally from controversy at the same time. Director Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel’s Norwegian directorial debut Armand, the winner of the Caméra d’Or for best first feature at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, thrusts us without warning into one of these scenarios, building steadily from a claustrophobic, if seemingly grounded drama into an increasingly abstract, bestial descent into madness. At times, Armand threatens to lose itself entirely in the fever dream it conjures, like the film itself is going to reach its combustion point and ignite, but it gets just enough of its disquieting atmosphere across to lodge in the memory all the same.
Armand is a war of emotions and wills, a battle fought on three fronts: Elizabeth (Renate Reinsve of The Worst Person in the World), mother of the titular boy Armand; Sarah (Ellen Dorrit Petersen), mother of another 6-year-old boy, Jon; and the triune school administration team of teacher Sunna (Thea Lambrechts Vaulen), Principal Jarle (Øystein Røger) and vice-principal Ajsa (Vera Veljovic), all of whom are caught in the middle after calling the parents in for a conference regarding a recent incident between the two boys. The seemingly sexual potential nature of the altercation, and Armand’s role as the aggressor, are both matters of debate and doubt–no one can say for certain exactly what happened behind closed doors with a pair of 6 year olds. On each side, the parents enter the prison-looking school–antiseptic, institutional, dehumanizing–ready to assume the best of their child and the worst of everyone else. Inside, a child has drawn what looks like a crayon image of bombs raining down on a city as people run for cover. Each person’s footsteps on the linoleum tiles of the halls echo with booming tones evoking that coming apocalypse.
This is what Armand does really well, evoking a moment and a place where the rigidly polite bounds of society are in danger of snapping altogether, resulting in an explosion of deeply buried emotion and repressed anger and recrimination. Tøndel has stuck his collection of characters in a pressure cooker in the sweltering school, as heat quite literally ripples in the air between the parents, an outward manifestation of their righteous indignation. Elizabeth, a former actress of some renown whose career stalled following the auto wreck death (suicide?) of her husband Thomas, refuses to believe that Armand could have any conception of the sexual language he’s accused of having used. Sarah, who was also Thomas’ sister, clearly resents her former sister in law and wants to see some kind of performative justice employed against Armand, regardless of the inconsistencies involved in everyone’s stories. The school employees, meanwhile, look like they’re having the very will to live drained out of them by the process–one has constant nose bleeds, while the male Principal is constantly looking for an excuse to end the meeting and escape. Most sympathetic is young but hapless teacher Sunna, who is thrown to the wolves in her initial meeting with the parents, seemingly trying to prove herself to her bosses as a level-headed mediator. Set against a faulty fire alarm system that keeps blaring at random, the effect is like an audience panic attack that regresses and then pounces again in waves. We are inside the pressure cooker, and the school is gradually killing anyone who dares to linger there.
At the same time, the tense standoff is constantly threatening to escape its boundaries as various elements of the trifecta wander the halls, encounter other people and word of the alleged assault begins to trickle in the direction of other parents. Tøndel captures an unspoken fear of a mob mentality; the societal need for punishment even when no elements of the truth can really be verified. Armand becomes increasingly twisty and labyrinthine, the school seeming ever more alien as the film breaks the bonds of reality and dives headfirst into abstraction and surrealistic metaphor.
How surreal are we talking? How do several full-on interpretive dance sequences strike you? It is questionable whether these digressions, which all arrive in the film’s final third are really warranted or necessary, given that Armand is already maintaining very high levels of tension and suspense in its first half–tension that deflates a bit when Reinsve is suddenly engaging in a spirited fantasy dance sequence with a janitor in the halls of the school. It feels a bit as if Tøndel (grandson of Liv Ullmann and Ingmar Bergman) doesn’t fully trust the inherent strength of the quandary he’s immersed the characters in, the intensity of that chamber dynamic, and is trying to reach for something transcendent to bring it all together, but it doesn’t flow as smoothly as the more realistic confrontations. With that said, there’s an effectively elemental simplicity to one of the concluding scenes, set in the pouring rain outside the school as a group of parents wordlessly expresses their ultimate judgement.
What Armand has is a core of fantastic performances, particularly from Renate Reinsve, whose Elizabeth swings wildly from positions of pity and confusion to psychosexual control and something akin to madness. She reaches her peak–and the film’s–a little past the halfway point when Elizabeth, overwhelmed by the absurdity of the moment, the punishingly circular conversations and the administrators’ carefully couched language and protestrations of sympathy for her and Armand, begins to laugh uncontrollably. Beginning as inappropriate giggles and building over the course of five unbroken minutes into alternating howls and sobs of laughter and anguish, it is a spectacularly uncomfortable thing to watch–just incredibly uncomfortable, in the best of ways. It’s not quite Isabelle Adjani in the subway in Possession, but it’s a cinematic breakdown that enters the same canon. That there’s still roughly an hour to go afterward speaks to how the film can feel overstuffed with the surreal material that comes later.
Armand is, at the very least, a powerful chamber drama while it’s keeping its feet on the ground, one that reaches intensely offputting heights of anxiety when firing on all cylinders. It can’t quite find a way to resolve without getting bogged down in the desire to upend its own effective structure, but it remains a very promising debut for Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel.
Director: Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel
Writer: Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel
Stars: Renate Reinsve, Ellen Dorrit Petersen, Endre Hellestveit, Thea Lambrechts Vaulen, Øystein Røger, Vera Veljovic
Release date: Feb. 7, 2025
Jim Vorel is Paste’s Movies editor and resident genre geek. You can follow him on Twitter or on Bluesky for more film writing.