47/47
Armand, a 6-year-old boy, is accused of crossing the line with his best friend in elementary school in Norway’s official submission for the Best International Feature Film category at the 97th Academy Awards in 2025. Norwegian films tend to have low international ratings. , but here we have a film that manages to reach even the exceptionally low Norwegian standard. That’s a rare feat indeed. Most of the film looks like it was made by first-year film students. These students set out to create an experimental film that had never been seen before, and they succeeded. However, they forgot a few things. Among other things, they forgot that even bad films usually have a few tricks in the script to keep the audience hooked until the end – a few cliffhangers or other cinematic techniques. This film has none of that. It’s just exceptionally bad. It’s also, without a doubt, the cheapest film ever made. The cost is limited to the actors, the camera, the lighting and the sound team, and no one is technically overworked in any scene. If you are strong enough to like a camera and a microphone, you can make this movie. The movie is set exclusively in the hallways and rooms of the school. They didn’t even bother with the backdrops. This is a school, a county-run school, and they probably borrowed it for free. The actors don’t do a particularly bad job. But it’s hard for actors to give completely bad performances – it takes an exceptionally bad director to make actors look bad. Strictly speaking, it’s not the actors’ fault that the movie is terrible. Since they agreed to take on the roles anyway, their performance in Armand is part of their cinematic history. You can’t give the movie a 0, but if you could, it would have earned a 0 simply because it doesn’t deserve a 1. By the way, this is Norway’s contribution to this year’s Oscars. The Norwegian Oscar committee has decided that this is the best film made in Norway this year. How they came to this conclusion is a mystery, considering that there were quite a few bad Norwegian films made this year, but Armand is the worst. There are plenty of bad Norwegian films to choose from that are much better than this one. For those who don’t know, Norway has no internationally significant actors. For comparison: Sweden and Denmark have several dozen. This film, with its trip to the USA and its Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film, shows the entire film industry that Norway is, in many practical respects, a country without a functioning film scene.