10/48
Armand, a 6-year-old boy, is accused of breaking boundaries with his best friend in elementary school. Norway’s official nomination for Best International Feature Film at the 97th Academy Awards in 2025. Norwegian films They, as a rule, have a low international standard, but here we have a film that manages to reach an exceptionally low Norwegian standard. This is a truly rare achievement. The film looks as if it was shot by first-year film school students. These students set out to create an experimental film unlike anything seen before, and they succeeded. However, they forgot something. Among other things, they forgot that even in bad films there is usually some trick in the script that keeps the viewer’s attention until the very end, some plot twists or other cinematic techniques. There is nothing similar in this film. It’s just extremely bad. It is also probably the cheapest film ever made. Expenses are limited to actors, camera, lighting and sound crew, and no one faces technical difficulties in any wall. If you are strong enough to hold a camera and microphone, you could make this movie. The action of the film takes place entirely in the corridors and classrooms of the school. They didn’t even bother with the decorations. It’s a school, a county-run school, and they probably took it for free. The actors don’t act terribly. But it’s hard for actors to play badly: for actors to look bad, an extremely bad director is needed. So, strictly speaking, the fact that the film is terrible is not the fault of the actors. However, since they agreed to play these roles, an appearance in the film “Arman” will be part of their film screening. It is impossible to rate the film 0, but if it were possible, it would deserve 0 simply because it does not deserve 1. By the way, this is Norway’s contribution to this year’s “Oscar”. The Norwegian Oscar Committee decided that this is the best film shot in Norway this year. How they came to such a conclusion is a mystery, considering that there were many bad Norwegian films released this year, but “Arman” is the worst of them. There are many bad Norwegian films that are much better than this one. For those who don’t know, there are no major international players in Norway. For comparison, there are several dozen of them in Sweden and Denmark. This film, shown in the USA and nominated for the “Oscar” award in the “Best Foreign Language Film” category, clearly demonstrates to the entire film industry that Norway, in fact, is a country without a functioning cinematic environment.
