“The systematically unpredictable Thelma is Joachim Trier and his team’s most sonorous, lyrical and adventurous film… Thelma is seductive and musical in tone and construction. The imagery is more expansive than in Trier’s earlier feature films, which leaned towards dialogue and realism, marked by visual restraint. Thelma looks more like his early shorts, augmented by a new artistic maturity, experience and technique.” - Dag Sødtholt, Montages Magazine
“The film maintains a hum of stoic, nerve-trembling anxiety that carries through to its finale. Yet in its resolution, Thelma affirms what so many troubled people have come to understand in reality over time. There’s no going back and undoing what was, but there can still be hope for the future as long as you have it within yourself to endure through the worst of it. If you make it.” – Dominick Suzanne-Meyer, Consequence of Sound
“Emotion, like matter, has substance, weight, heft. It exists. It cannot be destroyed. What happens when you say to a deeply feeling young woman like Thelma, ‘It is never okay to express any of this’? Where is all that emotion supposed to go? It is this question that Trier, an extremely empathetic filmmaker, cares about the most.” – Sheila O’Malley, RogerEbert.com
***
“It's just really, really special to be a cinephile alive in the days of Joachim Trier… Louder Than Bombs is the Norwegian director's first film made outside of his mother tongue (though it is still a Norwegian co-production), set in New England and written entirely in English by Trier and his regular co-writer, Eskil Vogt… Most born-and-bred English-speaking screenwriters would be hard-pressed to come up with something as literate and sophisticated and solemnly novelistic as Trier and Vogt's layered, heavily introspective character drama about the grieving process and the limitations of personal perception.” - Tim Brayton, Alternate Ending
“The film is visually spectacular. The war images are authentic and striking, as are the shots of quiet suburban life... The way Trier tells the story and switches up the narrative between varied voiceovers showcases his talent as a filmmaker. He truly brings something new to cinema.” - Prachi Kamble, Vancouver Arts Review
“Louder Than Bombs is a powerful rumination on the nature of family in an age of digital distraction and ceaseless war. Told with a quiet cinematic bravura that somehow never calls attention to itself, this is a movie that captures, with singular intimacy and humanity, just how difficult it can be to communicate with the people you love the most.” - Oliver Jones, Observer
***
[Peter] I feel that you’re not getting enough Norwegian cinema in your movie diet, so I’m here to fix that deficiency by way of a Joachim Trier month. Trier literally burst onto the international scene in 2021 with THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD, which won numerous international awards and was nominated for 2 Oscars, and which made people stand up and ask, “Who isthis guy, and what else has he done?” We begin our Trier retrospective with a double bill, two seemingly different movies in setting and tone but with a surprising confluence of themes.
THELMA (2017) is not your typical teenage-girl-coming-of age story; critic David Edelstein said that “THELMA is like Carrie remade by Ingmar Bergman”, and that quote alone should pique your interest. LOUDER THAN BOMBS (2015) is a more conventional (but far from simple) family drama, with a stellar cast including Gabriel Byrne, Jesse Eisenberg and the Queen of Doom herself, Isabelle Huppert. In a lot of ways, it reminds me of a modern reboot of Ordinary People, the 1980 movie that set the standard for depicting well-to-do American families with a polished veneer and rotting interior. We will conclude Joachim Trier month the following week
with the aforementioned THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD (2021), hands-down one of my favourite movies of this decade.
Warning: there is a scene in THELMA involving flashing/strobe lights that may be triggering for some viewers.
You can stream THELMA and LOUDER THAN BOMBS for free on Kanopy.
Happy viewing!
