Thel­ma

There is an ener­gy that pow­ers the first two fea­tures by direc­tor Joachim Tri­er, 2006’s Reprise and 2011’s Oslo, August 31^st. By com­par­i­son his fourth fea­ture, a return to Nor­we­gian-lan­guage film­mak­ing after 2015’s Amer­i­can exper­i­ment Loud­er Than Bombs, may appear as baf­fling­ly sedate. Thel­ma unfolds in the cold, slow force field of its cold, slow anti­heroine. As, like the frozen lake locat­ed beside her fam­i­ly home, some­thing dis­turb­ing lies beneath the sur­face of this film. Tri­er relies on this intrigu­ing absence to sus­tain atten­tion over the best part of two hours.

To blud­geon our sens­es into know­ing that all is not well with first year uni­ver­si­ty stu­dent Thel­ma (Eili Har­boe), Ola Fløttum’s elec­tron­ic score drones across most sequences. Some­thing is also amiss in the fam­i­ly dynam­ic. Father Trond (Hen­rik Rafaelsen) is pecu­liar­ly over-involved (he knows when Thel­ma makes a new friend on Face­book) while moth­er Unni (Ellen Dor­rit Petersen) is embalmed beneath a sor­row­ful glaze.

The first indi­ca­tion that some­thing is wrong comes when Thel­ma has a seizure in a uni­ver­si­ty study room – an event por­tend­ed by a bird fly­ing into a win­dow and a ​“hi” from beau­ti­ful fel­low stu­dent, Anja (Kaya Wilkins). As she falls to the floor, a wet patch spreads out on Thelma’s jean-clad groin. By the next scene her whole body is wet as she swims in a cav­ernous swim­ming pool. Anja joins her in this lone­ly space and kneels down on the pool edge to check on Thelma’s well­be­ing. The pair share loaded eye contact.

Aid­ed by occa­sion­al flash­backs to Thelma’s girl­hood, the nar­ra­tive unfolds not so much by par­celling out chunks of infor­ma­tion but in tiny sliv­ers. Har­boe deliv­ers a delib­er­ate­ly blank per­for­mance. As with Ryan Gosling in Dri­ve, when asked a ques­tion she gazes before respond­ing. It’s hard to get stuck into a char­ac­ter giv­en so lit­tle colour beyond a mys­tery afflic­tion. In the absence of per­son­al­i­ty, the cam­era drinks in her ath­let­ic pret­ti­ness through close-ups and scenes where she, a lon­er, is the only mov­ing ele­ment in the frame.

Only the intro­duc­tion of Anja means she is less alone. The flip side is Anja’s near­ness incites sex­u­al long­ing and this long­ing incites more seizures – psy­chogenic non-epilep­tic seizures as they are lat­er diag­nosed. Fan­tas­ti­cal sequences indi­cate her men­tal aban­don­ment: veins beneath the skin are lit up by elec­tri­cal cur­rents, glass shat­ters, a snake glides around a neck as a hand slides into under­wear. The visu­als are com­pelling but some­thing is miss­ing. The tone is too flat and the world-build­ing too smooth for this film to ever come ful­ly to life.

Where it’s going is fas­ci­nat­ing enough yet with­out an under­cur­rent of the human life caught in this hor­ror, Thel­ma feels too stark an exer­cise. One is left with its ideas on a the­o­ret­i­cal lev­el rather than a gut-wrench­ing one. The reveals open up a philo­soph­i­cal gold­mine, but these shin­ing offer­ings end up scat­tered on the sur­face. Trier’s first two films proved him a genius at ren­der­ing the heat of emo­tion­al inten­si­ty. One won­ders why he has turned so cold.