Is Oslo, August 31^st the coolest film ever made about being sad?

Oslo, August 31^st is a great film about some­thing inside that can’t find a foothold in the world of peo­ple and con­ver­sa­tions and par­ties and job inter­views and casu­al sex and all that noise. Anders (Anders Danielsen Lie) is a recov­er­ing drug addict who has been clean for 10 months and seems to have been in an idyl­lic Scan­di rehab facil­i­ty for all of that time. He goes on a day trip to Oslo for a job inter­view and sees a lot of old faces from his past. It would be wrong to say that the peo­ple are his undo­ing, or the city is his undo­ing, because Anders is already undone.

He is just look­ing for some­one to recog­nise this about him, but even with his old­est friend, they just scratch the sur­face, focus­ing on the sta­tus loss­es that take place if you opt out of the rat race via hero­in abuse. A wife, kids, a nice home and a good job aren’t what Anders is search­ing for. He is very sad and very lost and this spills out around the edges of con­ver­sa­tions, in tone of voice, eyes, frus­trat­ed, pent-up ener­gy. Anders is a coiled spring with no place to belong apart from slumped on a bed with a belt around his arm and hero­in in his veins. I am not a hero­in addict but I under­stand the lure of addic­tion: it is a home for the home­less, a deep rich awful hell that can mir­ror a person’s deep rich awful hell in a way that noth­ing else can.

Many peo­ple have a nascent per­son­al urgency run­ning through them – maybe not as over­whelm­ing­ly as for Anders – but most peo­ple yearn to release some­thing more pri­mal than will ever be accept­ed with­in the run-of-the-mill busi­ness of being a decent per­son in soci­ety. Most of us have the option of play­ing along, which is a default that can be sus­tained if you have a stake in the sta­tus quo, but Anders is apart from all that. He has defi­ant dig­ni­ty which pow­ers 90 min­utes of ener­gy com­bus­tion, like the final spec­ta­cle of a dying star.

The film begins with his attempt­ed sui­cide and ends with a less direct form of attempt­ed sui­cide. Per­son­al tor­ment as rel­a­tive insignif­i­cance is cap­tured by the title, Oslo, August 31^st, a sparse entry in the his­to­ry of time.

In between the nar­ra­tive book­ends focused on achiev­ing obliv­ion, Anders tries to talk to peo­ple. They are nice peo­ple who just hap­pen to be pre­oc­cu­pied with under­stand­able con­cerns – kids and rela­tion­ships, or fun and sex. Anders doesn’t want what they want. It’s unclear whether he even knows what he wants. ​“I’ve got noth­ing,” he says. He doesn’t break down and his eyes don’t fill with tears. His anguish is qui­et and implo­sive, into­na­tion pitched as wist­ful­ly as the wind rustling through trees. He is not the type to go down amid cries for help. He is half-checked out already with no heart for con­ver­sa­tion­al theatrics.

There is one per­son that he longs for: Iselin. He tries to call her through­out the film and through­out the film she nev­er picks up. The self-lac­er­at­ing sad­ness of Anders is that he knows that the life he was sup­posed to have has drift­ed out of reach. We gath­er it has been six years since he last served in his cho­sen pro­fes­sion of mag­a­zine writ­ing. The only cur­ren­cy he has left is a tal­ent for telling the truth. He tells it and he tells it, and it’s not enough to las­so the peo­ple from his for­mer world, with noth­ing in com­mon with his exis­ten­tial paral­y­sis. All his truth can be is the cap­ti­vat­ing heart of this incred­i­ble film, which makes you ache for peo­ple whose lives fell out of time, and the part of you that knows how that could go.

Joachim Trier’s new film, Loud­er Than Bombs, is released 22 April.