Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel’s debut feature, Armand, opens with a summons. Set almost entirely at a primary school in Norway, Elisabeth ( Renate Reinsve) is called in to attend a meeting pertaining to urgent matters concerning her six-year-old son, the titular Armand. Elisabeth isn’t primed at all about the specifics of the meeting agenda before the other parent-duo arrives.
The young teacher, Sunna (Thea Lambrechts Vaulen), is tasked with conducting the thorny, unpleasant session. She’s hardly equipped to handle the situation. Her superiors instruct her not to get carried away by her own opinion on the matter. Sunna should be cautious because, as she is reminded, she is representing the school.
Tøndel is particularly brilliant at drawing out the nervous expectation of an early moment in the film, as Elisabeth and Sunna uneasily wait for the parents’ entry in the room, the rising sound of the latter’s footsteps in the corridor filling the air. There’s also the school’s malfunctioning fire alarm that goes off every now and then. It’s a clever addition that bracingly aids an edge of atmosphere to the already taut proceedings that gradually unravel. Once Sarah ( Ellen Dorrit Petersen) and Anders (Endre Hellestveit) take their seats, the bomb is hurled at Elisabeth.
The accusation is such that Armand sexually abused their son, Jon. It’s described as a “sexual deviation” by the characters. Elisabeth is also caught completely unaware, or that’s how she projects herself when she hears that there’s also been past trouble with Armand. Armand isn’t an easy child, and perhaps they should have acted earlier, the headmaster, Jarle (Øystein Røger), wonders. Jarle’s panic at having this uncomfortable conversation to oversee and navigate couldn’t be more obvious until he is compelled to step in himself.
Elisabeth is quick to press the point that she cannot fathom why and how those earlier disciplinary lapses of her son are being pointed out while discussing an instance as severe as this one. She tells them she sees both she and her son have been judged in advance. Elisabeth instantly snaps, flagging the plausibility and likelihood of a six-year-old being familiar with the vocabulary that Sarah and the school authorities allege was used by Armand. “Anal” and “fuck”? The couple suggests that the latter isn’t such an odd parlance that she should be so shocked.
Sarah is insistent that Elisabeth is really feigning her expressions of dismay and being overwhelmed, as well as all the emotional extremes she displays, which Sarah doesn’t think of anything but mere theatrics designed to pivot attention to herself. Sarah reiterates to everyone that Elisabeth is an actor who likes making it all about her and hogging the stage. She needs to create drama, Sarah adamantly emphasizes. While others in the room advise a little bit of kindness and sensitivity towards Elisabeth because of how tough her life has recently been, Sarah stays unrelentingly skeptical.
That Elisabeth’s career has been rocky lately doesn’t deserve a dose of additional compassion because she knows perfectly well how to weaponize her circumstance and manipulatively tweak other situations to her favour. Soon, questions are tossed at her, unmasked in a wariness of her reliability as a mother who is capable of raising her son with a healthy value system. Her disbelief and stark amusement at the barrage of insinuations results in her slipping into a laughing fit. This lasts over a span of nearly five minutes. As the uncontrollable laughter darkly shades into agony and sobs, Reinsve is astonishing.
Slowly, key details of the intimate history connecting the characters emerge. Sarah and Elisabeth were once old friends. After all, they share family bonds. Sarah has never fully recovered from the death of her brother and Elisabeth’s husband. It was known to have been an accident, but Sarah has long-nursed misgivings about it, choosing to distrust Elisabeth’s reported side of the story. She questions the legitimacy of the ‘accident’ claim, veering to an inkling that it was suicide instead.
This film is wholly concentrated on a battle of wills between the parents. Both sides are stubborn in defending and upholding their idea of truth and certitude regarding how the events actually unfolded, even though both are racked by a tightening grip of anxieties. Their certainties of absolute truth are gradually dislodged over the course of the narrative, with either side privately admitting fears, misjudgment, and exaggeration. Could there be things that they have been holding back on or probably misrepresented?
Elisabeth begins to have apprehensions and doubts about whether Armand ever saw Thomas beating her. The veracity of the actual deeds subjected to Jon also starts to get foggy. Armand demands a high-wire leap from Reinsve, who grounds every beat of the psychologically fraught, knotty drama with an unswerving ferocity. There’s a stunning sequence where Elisabeth breaks into a freefalling dance, reaching for the release of all the coiled-up emotional jumble inside her.
As the film, in its second hour, converges on the tussle between Elisabeth and Sarah, sharply accentuating Thomas’s absent but overwhelming influence, Petersen is also formidable. Shot by Pål Ulvik Rokseth against a bleak, blanched color palette, Tøndel keeps the drama to a chilly austerity of tone but cannot resist inserting a string of stylized sequences, including a harrowing climactic one with Elisabeth struggling to ward off the forcefulness of judgment. Tøndel is a laceratingly honest filmmaker who combines a microscopic level of inquiry into people hurting and lying to each other with a disconcerting instinct for unsheathing in a moment of intense charge. Armand is a superb, polished debut that unwraps itself with potent, invidious undercurrents whose effects slowly get under the skin.
