Thelma

Norwegian director Joachim Trier hasn't failed to date. Each one of his four feature films is a powerful exploration of human passions and the labyrinths that can exist inside one person's mind. But even when each of his previous films has a strong identity, the biggest cinematic leap that the director has taken comes in Thelma, his first exploration of "genre cinema".

But rather than a pure horror film or thriller Trier tries to erase the limits between an intimate drama about the sexual arousal of a young woman and a paranormal sci-fi about a contemporary Carrie. He takes his time with the characters, to create them and to trace their narrative arc, so when we are presented with Thelma, coming from a very religious family, but facing a strong attraction with a female classmate, we go through a sinuous road of self-discovery and a clash of personal beliefs against intimate passions. This queer exploration is close to what Abdellatif Kechiche presented a few years ago in La Vie d'Adèle, a honest quest of a young woman for her personal identity through a romantic relationship outside of traditional moral canons. Eli Harboe is quite convincing in the existential struggle of her character.

But to make this conflict even more dense, there's a metaphysical element that changes the whole game of the traditional(?) teen queer narrative: Thelma has psychic powers that she can't quite control. Trier seems to understand the genre conventions very well, so he makes a great use of cinematic elements (music, editing, rhythm) to create a tense cold atmosphere that at times is very similar to Tomas Alfredson's Lat Den Rätte Komma In. From the opening sequence (a man takes his daughter into the icy woods for hunting a deer, but instead of aiming at the animal, he aims for the little girl), he grabs us and intrigues us with an unsettling feeling that won't leave us until we reach the final credits.

But the most outstanding part of the whole movie, and the one that ties those polar narratives (the intimate and the supernatural) is the absolute elegance in the images. Trier (like the danish filmmaker with the same last name; you know, that Lars Von guy) is growing to be quite and aesthete, offering us a beautiful and haunting cinematography full of symbolisms and that is able to convey subtle hidden meanings through imagery that could be quite disturbing and reflects the beauty in the morbid and obscure.

Trier is slowly paving his way into the canon of great contemporary European directors like Östlund, Zvyaginstev, Mungiu and Lanthimos. Thelma shows an entirely new register for the director, both in theme (even when we can still found a common trace in the study of mental health across his four films) and in style, and it is an exciting amalgam of genres in such a strong poetic cinematography, that we can only wait anxiously to see what will be his next step.