33/33
Armand, a 6-year-old boy, is accused of molesting his best friend in elementary school. Norway’s official entry for the Best International Feature Film category; in the category for the 97th Academy Awards in 2025. Norwegian films usually have a low international standard, but here we have a film that manages to reach an extremely low Norwegian standard. This is a rare achievement indeed. The film mostly looks like it was made by first-year film school students. These students set out to make an experimental film that was different from anything they’ve seen before, and they succeeded. However, they forgot a few things. Among other things, they forgot that even bad films usually have some tricks in the script to keep the audience hooked until the end – some cliffhanger or other cinematic tricks. This film has none of those. It’s just extremely bad. It’s also arguably the cheapest film ever made. The budget is limited to actors, camera, lighting and sound crew, and no one is technically challenged in any scene. If you’re strong enough to hold a camera and a microphone, you can make this movie. The movie takes place entirely in the hallways and rooms of the school. They didn’t even bother with sets. It’s a school, a county school, and they probably got it for free. The actors don’t do bad work. But it’s hard for actors to be completely bad – it takes an extremely bad director to make actors look bad. So, strictly speaking, it’s not the actors’ fault that the movie is terrible. But since they agreed to take on the roles, their participation in Armand will be part of their cinematic record. It’s impossible to give the movie a 0, but if it were, it would be worth 0 simply because it doesn’t deserve a 1. Incidentally, this is Norway’s contribution to this year’s Oscars. The Norwegian Oscar committee decided that it was the best film made in Norway this year. How they came to this conclusion is a mystery, considering there have been quite a few bad Norwegian films made this year, but Arman is the worst. There are plenty of bad Norwegian films to choose from that are far better than this one. For those who don’t know, Norway has no internationally significant actors. By comparison, Sweden and Denmark have dozens. This film, with its trip to the US and nomination for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, proved to the entire film industry that Norway is, for many practical purposes, a nation without a functioning film industry.