49/24
Armand, a 6-year-old boy, is accused of crossing the line against his best friend in elementary school. category of the 97th Academy Awards in 2025.. Norwegian films generally hold themselves to a low international standard, but here we have a film that manages to achieve an exceptionally low Norwegian standard. It is a rare achievement indeed. The film mostly looks like it was made by first-year film school students. These students set out to create an experimental film that was unlike anything we have seen before, and they succeeded. But they forgot a few things. Among other things, they forgot that even bad films usually have a few tricks in the script that keep the audience entertained until the end – some cliffhangers or other cinematic techniques. This film has none of that. It is just exceptionally bad. On top of that, it is undoubtedly the cheapest film ever made. The budget is limited to actors, camera, lighting and sound crew, and there is no one technically challenged in any of the scenes. If you are strong enough to hold a camera and a microphone, you could make this film. The entire film takes place in the hallways and rooms of a school. They didn’t even bother with sets. This is a school, a county school, and they probably rented it for free. The actors don’t do a bad job outright. But it’s hard for actors to act completely bad – it takes an extremely bad director to make actors look bad. So, strictly speaking, it’s not the actors’ fault that the film is terrible. However, since they agreed to take on the roles, part of their filmography will be that they appeared in Armand. It’s impossible to give a film a zero score, but if it were, it would deserve 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 was the best film made in Norway this year. How they came to this conclusion is a mystery, considering that there have been quite a few bad Norwegian films made this year, but Armand is the worst. There are plenty of bad Norwegian films to choose from that are much 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 its nomination for the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, shows the entire film industry that Norway is, for many practical reasons, a nation without a functioning film scene.