Thelma

Released in 2017, Thelma was Joachim Trier's fourth feature and his first foray into genre. It arrived between the English-language Louder Than Bombs and The Worst Person in the World, the film that would become his international breakthrough. Co-written as ever with Eskil Vogt, it premiered at Toronto and was Norway's 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, 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 and build dread through stillness, holding back on shocks; Ola Fløttum's score hums beneath the surface. The film has been read as a Nordic cousin to Carrie, though its real subject is repression and what it costs to break free of it.

Critics admired the way Trier folded a coming-of-age and coming-out story into the machinery of a horror film without sacrificing either. It consolidated Harboe's standing as one of Scandinavia's most watchable young actors. It is still the most formally adventurous film Trier has made, and it showed that the so-called "elevated" genre film could carry the full weight of his preoccupations.