28/22

Armand, a 6-year-old boy, is accused of crossing the line against his best friend in elementary school. Norway’s official entry for the 2025 97th Academy Awards in the “Best International Feature Film” category. Norwegian films are generally of low international standards, but here is a film that also achieves exceptionally low Norwegian standards. This is a rare feat indeed. The film appears to have been made mostly by first-year film school students. These students set out to create an experimental film unlike any we’ve ever seen, and they succeeded. However, they forgot a few things. Among them is that even in the history of bad films, there are usually tricks that keep viewers engaged until the end – cliffhangers or other cinematic techniques. This film has none of those. It’s just exceptionally bad. And it’s arguably the cheapest film ever made. The costs are limited to the actors, the camera, the lighting and sound crew, and no one is technically challenged in any of the scenes. If you are strong enough to hold a camera and a microphone, you can make this film. The film is set entirely in the hallways and halls of a school. They didn’t even bother to design any of the sets. It’s a school, a municipal school, and it was probably rented for free. The actors don’t do a bad job per se. But it’s hard for actors to do very badly – it takes an extremely bad director to make actors look bad. So strictly speaking, it’s not the actors’ fault that the film is bad. However, since they agreed to play the roles, their appearance in Armand will be part of their filmography. You can’t give the film a 0, but if you did, it would simply deserve a 0 because it doesn’t deserve a 1. Plus, it’s Norway’s contribution to this year’s Oscars. The Norwegian Oscar committee decided that this film was the best Norwegian film of the year. How they came to this conclusion remains a mystery, considering there have been many bad Norwegian films this year, but Armand is the worst. There are many bad Norwegian films to choose from, many better than this one. For those who don’t know, Norway has no internationally recognized actors. In comparison, Sweden and Denmark have dozens more. This film, by traveling to the United States and being nominated for the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, proves to the entire film industry that Norway is – for a number of practical reasons – a nation without a functioning cinema environment.