From Joachim Trier's Oslo trilogy to a remarkable run of Norwegian documentaries, ten essential Norwegian films from the most quietly impressive small national cinema in Europe.
Norway has emerged, over the past fifteen years, as one of the most consistently rewarding small national cinemas in the world. The Norwegian Film Institute has funded a remarkable run of work across drama, documentary, and genre filmmaking, much of which has reached international audiences. Joachim Trier's Oslo trilogy alone would justify the country's reputation; his collaborators, and the documentary filmmakers working alongside them, have built a body of work that earns Norway a permanent place in the European canon.
This list spans fourteen years and includes three Cannes laureates, three Academy Award nominees, and one Oscar winner. Whether you're new to Norwegian cinema or filling in the gaps, here are ten films you need to watch.
1. The Worst Person in the World (2021)
Dir. Joachim Trier · Norway · Drama / Romance / Comedy
Joachim Trier's Oslo trilogy concluded with the most internationally beloved Norwegian film of its decade. Renate Reinsve plays Julie, a young woman in her late twenties drifting between careers, partners, and possible futures in contemporary Oslo. The film is structured in twelve titled chapters plus a prologue and epilogue — a formal choice that allows Trier to skip across years without losing the texture of a life lived in the present tense.
Reinsve won Best Actress at Cannes; the film was nominated for two Academy Awards (Best International Feature and Best Original Screenplay). Eskil Vogt's screenplay, written with Trier as he has written every Trier feature, is one of the most precise pieces of contemporary writing about the millennial experience. A film that refuses every cliché of the romantic comedy while honouring its emotional logic.
2. Oslo, August 31st (2011)
Dir. Joachim Trier · Norway · Drama
The second film in Trier's loose Oslo trilogy and the one that announced his international reputation. Anders Danielsen Lie plays a recovering addict, in the late stage of his rehabilitation programme, granted a single day's leave to attend a job interview in central Oslo. The film unfolds across that day in long, patient takes that watch him reconnect (and fail to reconnect) with the friends and family of his earlier life.
Loosely adapted from Pierre Drieu La Rochelle's Le Feu Follet, the same source as Louis Malle's 1963 film, Trier's version transposes the material to a contemporary Norwegian context with extraordinary care. Danielsen Lie (a working physician as well as an actor) gives one of the most quietly devastating performances in recent European cinema. Eighty-five minutes that contain a complete portrait of a life.
3. Sentimental Value (2025)
Dir. Joachim Trier · Norway / France / Germany / Denmark / Sweden / UK · Drama
Trier's most ambitious film to date, and his fourth collaboration with Renate Reinsve. Two adult sisters, an actress and a producer, are confronted with their estranged father (Stellan Skarsgård), an aging filmmaker who has not been part of their lives since their mother's death. He has a project in mind, and a role written for one of them.
The film won the Grand Prix at Cannes 2025 (the festival's runner-up to the Palme d'Or) and has accumulated extraordinary critical reception. Skarsgård, in his first leading role for Trier, is paired with Elle Fanning as an American actress drawn into the family's orbit. A film about inheritance, art-making, and the impossibility of a clean reckoning with one's parents.
4. Armand (2024)
Dir. Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel · Norway / Netherlands / Germany / Sweden · Drama / Thriller
The debut feature of Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel — grandson of Liv Ullmann and Ingmar Bergman — and an extraordinarily assured first film. Renate Reinsve plays an actress summoned to her six-year-old son's school for a meeting about an alleged incident with another boy. The film unfolds almost entirely in the school's empty corridors and meeting rooms, as the parents and teachers attempt to reconstruct what happened.
The film won the Camera d'Or at Cannes 2024 (the prize for the best first feature across all sections of the festival). Reinsve, again, is the centre of gravity. Tøndel's writing is genuinely Bergman-adjacent — patient, claustrophobic, interested in the limits of self-knowledge — without ever feeling derivative. A debut as confident as any of recent years.
5. Headhunters (2011)
Dir. Morten Tyldum · Norway · Crime / Thriller
Morten Tyldum's adaptation of Jo Nesbø's novel was the highest-grossing Norwegian film of all time on its release and remains one of the most successful Scandinavian thrillers ever made. Aksel Hennie plays a successful corporate headhunter who funds his lavish lifestyle through a side career in art theft, and who picks the wrong target in a Dutch ex-mercenary (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau).
Tyldum's career took off internationally on the back of this film; he went on to direct The Imitation Game for Working Title and a series of major American productions. Headhunters remains the most stylish Scandinavian thriller of its decade — sharp, lean, occasionally very dark, and more genuinely surprising than most films of its kind.
6. King of Devil's Island (2010)
Dir. Marius Holst · Norway / France / Sweden / Poland · Drama / History
Set in the brutal Bastøy boys' reform school in 1915, the film centres on a teenage merchant sailor (Benjamin Helstad) sent to the island after a violent crime. Stellan Skarsgård plays the school's governor, who delivers his sermons on Christian discipline with the certainty of a man who has long since stopped questioning the institution he runs.
Marius Holst's film is shot on the actual island where the events took place, and uses the bleak Norwegian winter landscape as another character. The film earned Norway's submission for the Academy Awards and was nominated for the European Film Award for Best Cinematographer. A reminder that Norwegian cinema has a long tradition of returning to the institutional violence of its own past.
7. The 12th Man (2017)
Dir. Harald Zwart · Norway · Drama / History / Thriller
Based on the true story of Jan Baalsrud, a Norwegian resistance fighter whose 1943 sabotage mission against the German occupation went wrong off the coast of northern Norway. The film follows his attempt to escape across hundreds of kilometres of arctic wilderness in midwinter. Thomas Gullestad plays Baalsrud; Jonathan Rhys Meyers plays the German Gestapo officer pursuing him.
Harald Zwart, a director with experience in mainstream American productions, brings genuine craft to a story that has been told in Norway since the 1950s. The film's location work in the actual Lyngen Alps is unmatched in recent Scandinavian war cinema. A piece of historical recovery that doubles as one of the great endurance films.
8. The Remarkable Life of Ibelin (2024)
Dir. Benjamin Ree · Norway · Documentary / Biography
Mats Steen, a young Norwegian man with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, died in 2014 at the age of twenty-five. His parents had assumed his life had been small and isolated. After his death they discovered that he had been a leading figure in a long-running World of Warcraft community, where he was known as Ibelin Redmoore.
Benjamin Ree's documentary reconstructs Mats's online life from years of game logs and chat records, animating the avatars of his fellow players to recreate their relationships. The film won the World Cinema Documentary Audience Award at Sundance and a long list of subsequent festival prizes. A deeply moving piece of work that argues, without ever stating it directly, for a different definition of what a life can be.
9. The Painter and the Thief (2020)
Dir. Benjamin Ree · Norway / US · Documentary
The Czech-Norwegian artist Barbora Kysilkova has two large paintings stolen from an Oslo gallery. When the thief is identified and tried, she attends the proceedings, and afterwards approaches him to ask if he will sit for a portrait. He agrees, and the relationship that develops between them is the substance of Benjamin Ree's documentary.
Ree's film won the Sundance Special Jury Award for Creative Storytelling and was Norway's submission for the Academy Awards. The structural pivot at the film's midpoint is one of the most unexpected in recent documentary; the relationship between artist and subject is one of the most genuinely moving. The earlier of Ree's two films on this list, and a strong companion piece to Ibelin.
10. No Other Land (2024)
Dir. Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor · Palestine / Norway · Documentary
The collaborative documentary, produced by a Palestinian-Israeli filmmaking collective with Norwegian funding, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2025. Basel Adra, a Palestinian activist from the West Bank village of Masafer Yatta, films the demolition of his community's homes by the Israeli military over a five-year period. Yuval Abraham, an Israeli journalist, becomes a friend and collaborator.
The film's argument is in its method: the patient accumulation of footage of a single community across years, juxtaposed with the difficulty of the cross-border friendship at its centre. It also won the Berlinale's Documentary Award and the Panorama Audience Award. The Norwegian co-production support was decisive in getting the film made; it stands here as a testament to the kind of work the country's institutions are willing to fund.
The Norwegian Tradition
Two things are striking about contemporary Norwegian cinema. The first is the central role of a single director, Joachim Trier, whose Oslo trilogy and recent expansion into international co-production have given the country a permanent presence at Cannes. The second is the strength of Norwegian documentary filmmaking, which is now producing some of the most formally inventive work anywhere in Europe — Benjamin Ree's two films on this list are not isolated cases.
The country's small population and well-funded film institute have produced a cinema that takes risks, that returns to its own difficult history, and that increasingly speaks to international audiences without losing its specifically Norwegian voice.
Honourable Mention: Heavy Trip (2018)
Dir. Juuso Laatio & Jukka Vidgren · Finland / Norway · Comedy / Music
A Finnish-Norwegian co-production about a small-town heavy metal band attempting to drive across the border to play a Norwegian festival. Frequently very funny, occasionally surprisingly tender, and worth seeing if your tolerance for the more demanding entries on this list needs a palate cleanser.
Where to Start
If you're new to Norwegian cinema, The Worst Person in the World is the most rewarding entry point and the easiest to find streaming. For a thriller, Headhunters is the most efficient ninety minutes in modern Scandinavian genre cinema. For a documentary that will stay with you for weeks, The Remarkable Life of Ibelin is the most quietly devastating recent release.
If you enjoyed this list, explore our companion guides — our 10 Must-Watch Swedish Films of All Time and our 10 Must-Watch Danish Films.
See also our 10 Must-Watch Scandinavian Crime Series.
