Phoenix

This is a film which blends kitchen sink dra­ma with mag­i­cal real­ism to explore the respon­si­bil­i­ties a child must assume when neglect­ed by emo­tion­al­ly volatile parents.

It fol­lows Jill, played with heart-rend­ing restraint by Ylva Bjørkaas Thedin, in the lead-up to her 14^th birth­day. We see her as care­tak­er to her younger broth­er Bo (Casper Falck-Løvås ) and men­tal­ly unsta­ble moth­er, Astrid (Maria Bon­nevie), who is also an artist. Then tragedy strikes and Jill’s deter­mi­na­tion to keep up appear­ances allows her the breath­ing room to expe­ri­ence being a teenag­er, if only for one evening, when her absent jazz musi­cian father dressed head-to-toe in white whisks her away to one of his shows.

It’s an inci­sive and ten­der fea­ture debut, and direc­tor Camil­la Strøm Hen­rik­sen isn’t con­cerned with explor­ing the fall­out from a failed rela­tion­ship between a strug­gling painter and a suc­cess­ful musi­cian, as instead she elects to explore the cycli­cal nature of neglect by focus­ing on the chil­dren in the mid­dle. Jill is haunt­ed by her moth­er, whose appear­ance is often par­tial­ly obscured by the wild hair that Jill is forced to brush and tame.

In a nar­row apart­ment crowd­ed with paint­ings, Astrid’s art has infest­ed their psy­che and it comes to life. This feel­ing of dread is empha­sised by the fan­tas­tic score and sound design pro­vid­ed by Patrik Andrén and Johan Söderqvist, who echo Astrid’s hys­ter­i­cal laugh­ter, and in one scene they ampli­fy the slosh­ing sound of an unknown liquid.

Though the res­o­lu­tion leaves a lit­tle to be desired in terms of broad sat­is­fac­tion, the jour­ney is def­i­nite­ly worth your time. The per­for­mances by the young actors cut through stereo­types of put-upon, emo­tion­al­ly mature chil­dren and work towards cap­tur­ing an empa­thet­ic por­tray­al of a fam­i­ly in spir­i­tu­al cri­sis. At one point, Astrid explains to her daugh­ter that, ​‘my work may not be ground-break­ing, but at least it’s hon­est’. Hear hear.