42/40
Armand, a 6-year-old boy, is accused of crossing borders against his best friend at elementary school. Norway’s official submission for the “Best International Feature Film” category of the 97th Academy Awards in 2025. Norwegian films are usually of a low international standard, but here we have a film that also manages to achieve an exceptionally low Norwegian standard. This is a truly rare feat. The film seems to have been made mostly by first-year film school students. These students set out to create an experimental film like we’ve never seen before and they succeeded. However, they forgot a few things. Among other things, they forgot that even bad films usually have some plot tricks to keep viewers interested until the end – cliffhangers or other cinematic techniques. This film has none of that. It’s just exceptionally bad. Plus, it’s possibly the cheapest film ever made. Expenses are limited to actors, camera, lighting and sound equipment, and in no scene does anyone have technical problems. If you are strong enough to hold a camera and a microphone, you could make this movie. The movie takes place entirely in the hallways and lobbies of a school. They didn’t even bother planning any decorations. It’s a school, a county-run school, and they most likely borrowed it for free. The actors don’t do a bad job outright. But it’s hard for actors to act really badly – it takes an exceptionally bad director to make actors look bad. So, strictly speaking, it’s not the actors’ fault that the movie is bad. However, since they agreed to play the roles, it will be part of their film history that they star in the movie Armand. It’s not possible to give the movie a score of 0, but if it were, it would deserve a 0 simply because it doesn’t deserve a 1. Also, this is Norway’s contribution to this year’s Oscars. The Norwegian Oscar committee decided that this movie was the best Norwegian film of the year. How they came to this conclusion remains a mystery, considering that there have been a lot of bad movies made in Norway this year, but Armand is the worst. There are plenty of bad Norwegian movies to choose from, much better than this one. For those who don’t know, Norway has no internationally known actors. By comparison, Sweden and Denmark have even several dozen. This movie, with its trip to the United States and its nomination for the Best Foreign Film Oscar, proves to the entire film industry that Norway, for many practical reasons, is a nation without a functioning film environment.
