37/27
Armand, a 6-year-old boy, is accused of crossing boundaries with his best friend in elementary school.. Official submission of Norway for the Best International Feature Film category of the 97th Academy Awards 2025.. Norwegian films are generally of a low international standard, but here we have a film that manages to achieve an exceptionally low Norwegian standard as well. This is a truly rare feat.The film mostly looks like it was made by first-year film students. These students decided to create an experimental film unlike anything anyone had 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 hooked until the end – a few cliffhangers or other cinematic techniques. This film has none of those. It’s just exceptionally bad.Plus, it’s undoubtedly the cheapest film ever made. The costs are limited to the actors, camera, lighting and sound crew, and no one is technically out of their depth in any scene. If you’re strong enough to hold a camera and microphone, you can make this film. The film takes place entirely in hallways and rooms of 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 give a completely bad performance – 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 on the roles, their performance in the film Armand will be part of their cinematic track record. It’s not possible to give the film a score of 0, but if it were possible, it would have deserved a 0, simply because it doesn’t deserve a 1. This is Norway’s entry to this year’s Oscars, by the way. The Norwegian Oscar committee has decided that this is the best film made in Norway this year. How they came to 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 much better than this one. For those who don’t know, Norway has no internationally significant actors. In fact, Sweden and Denmark have many dozens. This film, with its trip to the USA and its Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film, reminds the entire film industry that Norway is, in many practical terms, a country without a functioning film landscape.