Thelma

Released in 2017, Thelma was Joachim Trier's fourth feature and his first foray into genre, arriving between the English-language Louder Than Bombs and the film that would become his international breakthrough, The Worst Person in the World. Co-written as ever with Eskil Vogt, it premiered at Toronto and was selected by Norway as its entry for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. For an art-cinema director steeped in the melancholy realism of Oslo, August 31st, the move into the supernatural was a deliberate gamble.

Eili Harboe plays Thelma, a sheltered young woman raised in a strict Christian household who moves to Oslo to study. Her first real taste of independence — and of desire, in the form of a classmate, Anja (Kaya Wilkins) — coincides with violent seizures that medicine cannot explain. Trier and cinematographer Jakob Ihre shoot the city in cool, controlled compositions, building dread through stillness rather than shock; Ola Fløttum's score hums beneath the surface. The film has been read as a Nordic cousin to Carrie, but its real subject is repression and the cost of breaking free of it.

Critics admired the way Trier folded a coming-of-age and coming-out story into the architecture of a horror film without sacrificing either. The film holds a strong critical standing and consolidated Harboe's standing as one of Scandinavia's most watchable young actors. It remains the most formally adventurous entry in Trier's body of work, and proof that the so-called "elevated" genre film could carry the full weight of his preoccupations.