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Renate reinssees in a drama on an island network that is interesting.
By Alissa Wilkinson
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Technically, “Armand” is not a folk horror movie. Technically, it’s not a horror movie at all. But the director Halfdan Ullmann Tondel wants us to wonder what we’re in for from the very start. First we see, in claustrophobically panicky close-up shots, a woman blazing down the road in her car. She’s speaking urgently on the phone to someone named Armand, asking if he is OK. Something is clearly wrong.
Then we’re at a school, and the camera slowly glides through the hallways, as if it’s a ghost watching the surroundings that we, and she, are about to enter. Disturbing Music Plays.
What is evil carries a while it takes place, and no, it is not a monster. (Not exactly. ) Instead, “Armand” considers the way evil, perpetuated through generations, brings communities to the island. Foreigners threaten the established order and will have to be dealt with accordingly. It’s this theme that makes the film feel like folk horror.
But during the peak of its runtime, “Armand,” which Tondel also wrote, more like a realistic drama, the genre in which a school shows up for total company, a bit like the 2023 film “The Teacher’s Lounge. “Elisabeth (Renate Reinsve), the woman in the car, is the single mother of 6-year-old Armand, who did something disturbing for a classmate. Assembly on the situation.
There are many seats and speaking in the classrooms, and breaks of breaks so that other people go to the bathroom or are nasal hemorrhages. The Assembly progresses through adjustments, which is as annoying for the characters as it is for the audience: only as things begin, the participants stop, get up, pass somewhere. We enter and leave the classroom with them, round trip in the halls, the position that finally begins to look like a maze in which the hall only leads to a position in which we feel that we once were.
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