Armand

When six-year-old Armand is accused of abusing another boy, his mother Elisabeth (The Worst Person in the World’s Renate Reinsve) is called in for a school meeting with the boy’s parents and a panel of key staffers. Volatile confrontations between the adults quickly follow, as do revelations about their own tangled histories. With the boys themselves never seen or heard from, it soon becomes clear that this sordid situation is about much more than just the children.

Winner of the Camera d’Or at Cannes, the debut feature of Norwegian writer-director Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel (the grandson of Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullmann), is a lacerating drama which at key moments boldly breaks from naturalism to convey the characters’ intense emotion. As the plot spirals outward from its claustrophobic, chamber-play premise, Reinsve matches the unpredictable narrative with a thrilling, live-wire turn as a protective mother caught in an impossible position.

Intense. The film starts by promising a bourgeois social drama about secrets and lies, suspicions and rivalries, and the troubled waters of juvenile and adult sexuality. What it ultimately becomes is much harder to define, but the result is resonant and haunting – and should spark plenty of post-screening discussions.

Jonathan Romney, Screen Daily

A fiercely visceral presence; Reinsve performs as if dancing on the edge of a knife.

Isaac Feldberg, rogerebert.com