Chills from top to bottom
Norway’s Thelma an irresistibly creepy mystery THELMA ★★★★★ out of 5 Cast: Eili Harboe, Kaya Wilkins Director: Joachim Trier Duration: 1 h 56 m
As opening scenes go, it’s a doozy.
Little Thelma is on a winter hunting trip near her home in Norway, with her dad. They walk over a glassy, frozen lake, where the child sees fish swimming below the ice.
Then into the woods, where papa takes a bead on a deer — and then pivots, aiming the rifle squarely at his daughter’s head. The deer bolts. The moment passes.
The story that follows finds Thelma (Eili Harboe) now a shy young woman starting university in Oslo. She meets a classmate, Anja (singer-songwriter and firsttime actor Kaya Wilkins), and the sudden force of their friendship has Thelma thinking it could be something more.
Thelma is physically troubled, as well as emotionally unsure. She starts having seizures.
The first one, in the school library, coincides with several birds hitting the room’s window, and prompting a question: Is she causing this?
The film is the latest from Norway’s Joachim Trier, and the country’s well-deserved entry in the best foreign-language film category at the upcoming Oscars.
It might broadly be defined as a horror — creepy music, menacingly calm cinematography — but it’s really more of a mystery, as Thelma’s attempts to figure out her condition lead her into some bizarre family history, not least that incident at the lake.
The less you know about the film going in the better. Trier’s careful direction and screenplay (written with his writing partner, Eskil Vogt) ensure that we’re never lost in the narrative, even as the questions and uncertainties start to pile up.
The film really hits its stride about halfway into its two hours.
The horror genre seems to produce more than its share of duds, but that only makes the great ones stand out all the more — creepy, wellscripted, character-driven chillers like The Babadook, It Follows, The Witch and Under the Skin. All of those also featured strong female characters, which is true of Thelma as well.
Coincidence, or just another of Thelma’s mysteries?