Hallvar Witzø’s “The Wrong Track” (På villspor, 2025) is all about taking a fresh look at your life, reshuffling what you think your chief priorities are, and surging forth with new possibilities. This Norwegian drama takes place in the dramatic, gigantic beauty of mountains, that become the playground for people to reorient their lives.
The Wrong Track (På villspor, 2025) Plot Summary & Movie Synopsis:
The Weight of Motherhood and the Struggle for Balance
Emilie (Ada Eide) struggles to juggle raising Lilli and carve out a functional life for herself. A well-paying job remains elusive. How can she get the two on a balancing act? It’s a tough, self-castigating act, one she can barely manage. Judgement comes swift and stern and dismissive from her ex-husband, Joachim (Christian Rubeck). Freshly estranged, Emilie tries hard to be the perfect mother, while denying a life for herself. It’s not easy. Being a perfect mother isn’t quite an option.
It’s demanding, punishing and she’s prone to judging herself severely. Joachim also doesn’t spare a chance to remind how terribly she’s pulling herself together. She’s constantly told she’s not doing enough, that she’s spectacularly failing. Not only does it tear to shreds every bit of self-esteem she has, but also drags her down into a cesspool from which she struggles hard to extricate. It pulls her down. When her flat’s toilet malfunctions, Joachim takes Lilli to his place. She grudges it deeply but lets him.
Family Strains and the Challenge of Perseverance
She puts up at her brother, Gjermund’s (Trond Fausa) place where he lives with his wife, Silje (Marie Blokhus). They have been trying for a baby but it’s not panning out. They’ve been together for fifteen years. They don’t abandon hope but the constant effort has brought strains on their marriage. It’s made them latently curdled and bitter. Each believes the other to be at fault. Silje is convinced Gjermund doesn’t share her desperate interest to have a child any longer, while he accuses her of wholly putting that wish at the centre and steamrolling over their entire marriage. She is also annoyed with him for continuing to be so protective and watchful about his sister, which he should just loosen up.
He pops the idea to Emilie to try out the Birken skiing competition. She’s taken aback at his proposal. She protests she’s barely fit for it. How on earth can she do it? She has to prepare herself, he insists. Emilie must do the training extensively. Only then can she do it easily, succeed entirely and with great passion. She trains with him. He guides her brilliantly. However, when her home gets fixed, she returns to daily life, hoping to land a job somewhere. It takes the singular, gently reproachful clarity of a friend to turn her around. She’s told that she has a habit of quitting every endeavour she takes up. She never follows it through.
Can Love and Purpose Survive Life’s Trials?
It’s a necessary reminder that yanks her back to her purpose. She departs with her brother for Birken, where they prepare for the long ski contest staring at them. The brother and his wife hit further crises in their marriage. Silje is devastated when her friends have more children and she cannot. Gjermund meets an influencer, Madeleine, whom he can’t help but feel attracted to. It brings a hot flush to him, something that he thinks he lost in his marriage. But she states her boundaries. They have the contest; she needs a good night’s sleep.
Emilie meets Ole (Deniz Kaya), a police officer. They instantly develop a mutual attraction. An intimacy blooms just over a night. That’s all it takes. Gjermund realises the influencer may not be an ideal person to pursue for a romance. She’s egoistic and hurtful to others and wholly invested in her agenda, thoughtless of the effects on others. It causes him to reconsider his priorities. There’s also Silje waiting for him at the finish line. She remains by his side, even when the going gets tough. They reaffirm their devotion and love for each other and shuffle away the importance of having a child. Instead, they decide they could just adopt a puppy, give him the love and affection they are desperate to bestow.
The Wrong Track (På villspor, 2025) Movie Ending Explained:
Does Emilie get to the finish line?
Joachim gets a direly needed lashing and a sense of perspective by his new wife who tells him he must be gentle with Emilie. She too will soon be a mother. Would he be harsh with her as well when they have their new child? It makes Joachim be considerate and generous and take Lilli to the race, where they cheer for Emilie. She’s almost about to drop out of the race entirely when she sees a message that her daughter is coming for her. It lifts her spirits and brings the wind to her sails. She gets all fired up and rejoins the race.
At the last minute, she would have been disqualified because somewhere along the way she lost her backpack. Kind strangers help her along, giving one of their backpacks and stuffing it with beer bottles so that she remains eligible for the race completion. She is finally able to complete the race. The final scene takes place eight months later. Emilie is now a bus driver. Along with Ole, her brother and his wife, Joachim and his wife and new child, and Lilli, they are now a happy, comfortable family, loving and compassionate.
The Wrong Track (På villspor, 2025) Movie Review:
Hallvar Witzø’s film dovetails perseverance, grit, the resolve to make life anew, irrespective of life’s obstacles. You may find yourself beaten down, depressed, and uncommitted, and flailing to get a grip on yourself. But you can just as well pick yourself up and charge forth. All you need is a reorienting of perspective, a determined push that will bring steely conviction back into your life as it rearranges itself towards a semblance of happiness.
The film has sincerity and sweetness, a genuine unalloyed belief in the goodness that may emanate from life, the blessings of sudden turns. Anything can change for the better with just a nudge in the right direction. Everyone in the cast channels a kind of workmanlike energy and zeal which is also the reason the film never ascends from watchable to truly enduring or memorable. You can’t ascribe much seriousness of purpose to the film.
This cloying flavour tips gradually into contrived character flips, all for the benefit of the two siblings at the centre. You’d also wonder how swiftly Silje suddenly changes her stance, and be equally exasperated by the lack of risk in the narrative or filmmaking. It’s troubling and never sits well, especially because the film devotes considerable fuss in delineating the couple’s conflicts.
“The Wrong Turn” is efficient but too simple-minded to strike itself deeply on the viewer. You keep wishing it to vault higher and be more ambitious. But it never achieves that, merely content in a single trajectory whose destination is frustratingly predictable. This is its fatal undoing. The humility of its pose begins to grate and the film doesn’t recover its nascent slump. Ultimately it’s impossible to distinguish it from any generic fare.
