46/50
Plot
Armand, a 6-year-old boy, is accused of crossing boundaries against his best friend at elementary school.. Official submission of Norway for the 'Best International Feature Film' category of the 97th Academy Awards in 2025.. Norwegian films generally hold a low international standard, but here we have a film that also manages to achieve an exceptionally low Norwegian standard. It’s a truly rare achievement.The film mostly looks like it was made by first-year film school students. These students decided to create an experimental film unlike anything seen before, and they succeeded. However, they forgot a few things. Among other things, they forgot that even bad films usually have a few tricks in the script to keep viewers engaged until the end-some cliffhangers or other cinematic techniques. This movie has none of those. It’s just exceptionally bad.Additionally, it is undoubtedly the cheapest film ever made. The expenses are limited to the actors, the camera, lighting, and sound crew, and in no scene anyone is technically challenged. If you’re strong enough to hold a camera and a microphone, you could make this film.The film takes place entirely in corridors and rooms in a school. They didn’t even bother with sets. This is a school, a county-run school, and most likely they borrowed it for free.The actors don’t do a directly bad job. But it’s hard for actors to perform outright badly-it takes an exceptionally 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 the roles, it will be part of their cinematic record that they appeared in the film Armand.It’s not possible to give the film a score of 0, but if it were, it would deserve a 0 simply because it doesn’t merit a 1.Incidentally, this is Norway’s contribution to this year’s Oscars. The Norwegian Oscar committee has decided that this is the best film made in Norway this year. How they arrived at this conclusion is a mystery, considering that quite a few bad Norwegian films have been made this year, but Armand is the worst. There are many bad Norwegian films to choose from that are far better than this one.For those who don’t know, Norway has no internationally significant actors. By comparison, Sweden and Denmark have many dozens, even. This film, with its trip to the U.S. and Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Film, demonstrates to the entire film industry that Norway, for many practical purposes, is a nation without a functioning film environment.