Technically, “Armand” is not a folk horror movie. Technically, it’s not a horror movie at all. But the director Halfdan Ullmann Tondel wants us to wonder what we’re in for from the very start. First we see, in claustrophobically panicky close-up shots, a woman blazing down the road in her car. She’s speaking urgently on the phone to someone named Armand, asking if he is OK. Something is clearly wrong.
Then we’re at a school, and the camera glides along the hallways slowly, as if it is a ghost observing the surroundings that we — and she — are about to enter. Ominous music plays. Something bad is lurking.
What the bad thing is takes a while to unfold, and no, it’s not a monster. (Not exactly.) Instead, “Armand” is about the way harm, perpetuated across generations, causes communities to turn insular. Outsiders threaten established order, and must be dealt with accordingly. It’s this theme that makes the film feel like folk horror.
But for most of its running time, “Armand,” which Tondel also wrote, feels more like a realist drama, the kind in which a school stands in for the whole of society, much like the 2023 film “The Teacher’s Lounge.” Elisabeth (Renate Reinsve), the woman in the car, is the single mother of 6-year-old Armand, who has done a disturbing thing to a classmate. That classmate’s parents, Sarah and Anders (Ellen Dorrit Petersen and Endre Hellestveit), are headed to the school as well for a meeting about the situation. The headmaster (Oystein Roger) and the school counselor (Vera Veljovic) have decided to put a junior teacher named Sunna (Thea Lambrechts Vaulen) in charge of the meeting. She may be in over her head.
There’s a lot of sitting and talking in classrooms, and a lot of taking breaks so people can go to the bathroom or tend to a nosebleed. The meeting progresses in fits and starts, which is as annoying to the characters as it is to the audience: Just when things get started, the attendees stop, get up, go somewhere. We move in and out of the classroom with them, back and forth through the halls, the place eventually starting to appear like a maze in which every hallway simply leads to some place we feel like we’ve already been.
These are bold choices on Tondel’s part, elliptical and elusive, constantly leaving us guessing where the characters stand in relation to one another. (That Tondel is the grandson of Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullman seems appropriate for this kind of narrative structure.) Slowly, additional information trickles out that changes how we look at each person. We are bystanders, shifting our judgments and wondering why we made those judgments in the first place.
The best element of “Armand” is its star. Reinsve, as Elisabeth, seems like she is in a different universe from everyone else in the school, which is both the point and appropriate to the character: Elisabeth is an outsider, a successful actress whose work causes the other parents to look at her askance.
Reinsve is beautiful and can conjure misery and mischief in the same breath, her smile equally capable of taunting or encouraging someone. She was terrific as a self-absorbed woman learning something about maturity in “The Worst Person in the World” from 2021; here she’s similarly charismatic but also explosive, at one point responding to the accusations against her son in helpless laughter that goes on for what feels like hours. It’s a physical and dynamic performance that shows her range, and when she is onscreen it’s mesmerizing.
The rest is more intermittently entertaining. A figure like Elisabeth, both feared and desired, represents a threat to the community, and they respond in kind. The film depicts both emotions in a literal way, with people standing far too close together, or touching in ways that seem odd. Sometimes it’s difficult to know if you’re seeing reality or imagination, and that keeps things humming along for a time.
Yet once you’ve grasped the real story, these choices start to be repetitive. The characters are, in a sense, trapped. But without being given the kind of tension that sustains interest, the audience is trapped as well.
By the end, a kind of narrative lethargy has set in. “Armand” feels mostly like an interesting formal exercise: an attempt to meld realism and surrealism in the most nondescript of places, but in a way that evokes an ancient terror. It’s just a little too easy to see the way the story’s pieces slot together to create that narrative, too tedious to hear people say things we expect them to say. And there’s too little insight to make it all worthwhile.
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