38/27
Armand, a 6-year-old boy accused of overstepping his bounds against his best friend in elementary school. The official Norwegian entry for the Best International Feature Film category. 2025. In the 97th Academy Awards category. Norwegian films usually have a low international standard, but here we have a film that also manages to achieve an exceptionally 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 unlike anything before, and they succeeded. But they forgot a few things. Among other things, they forgot that even bad film scripts usually have a few tricks up their sleeve that keep the audience hooked until the end with some cliffhanger or other cinematic technique. This film has none of those. It’s just incredibly bad. Plus, it’s arguably the cheapest film ever made. The cost is limited to the actors, the camera, the lighting, and the sound crew, and none of the scenes are technically challenging for anyone. If you’re strong enough to hold a camera and a microphone, you can make this movie. The movie takes place only in the hallways and rooms of the school. They didn’t even bother with the sets. It’s a school, a county-run school, and they probably borrowed it for free. The actors don’t do a downright bad job. But it’s hard for actors to look completely bad – it takes a particularly bad director to make actors look bad. So, strictly speaking, it’s not the actors’ fault that the movie is terrible. But because they agreed to play the roles, their performance in Armand will go on their filmography. It’s impossible to give the movie a 0, but if they did, it deserves it. A 0 simply because it doesn’t deserve a 1. By the way, this is Norway’s contribution to this year’s Oscars. The Norwegian Oscar committee decided that this is the best film made in Norway this year. How they came to this conclusion is a mystery, considering there have been a number of bad Norwegian films made this year, but Armand 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 Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film, shows the entire film industry that Norway is, for most practical purposes, a nation without a functioning film industry.