Directed by: Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel
Distributed by: IFC Films
Written by Michael Clawson
30/100
The closest thing to last year’s schoolroom thriller “The Teacher’s Lounge” that 2024 has had to offer, “Armand” is a gloomier kind of parent-teacher psycho-drama. Its color palette is muted, its camera angles off-kilter, the hallways of its elementary school setting eerily vacant. It starts with Renate Reinsve’s Elisabeth, a mother and an actress, tearing down a highway in her car as if she were chasing someone; it ends with a group of adults in a torrential downpour on a playground blacktop. In between, there is a tiring and aggravating film that is less interested in exploring its characters than it is in exploiting their troubled lives for suspense. I found it mostly ridiculous.
Elisabeth learns that her six-year-old son, Armand, has been accused by a classmate, Jon, of violence and sexual threats. She meets Jon’s parents, Jon and Armand’s young teacher, and two school administrators in a classroom for what is meant to be an orderly discussion of accusation. Their emotionally heated conversation, along with many whispery side conversations between various pairings of the adults, comprise the entire film. The dialogue is structured as a series of subtle unveilings: we gradually hear the specifics of what Jon’s parents say he told them about the incident, while also learning about the death of Elisabeth’s husband and their fraught marriage. Uncovering shades of its characters’ personal lives little by little, the film treats them each like a puzzle whose pieces are steadily being filled in. Not only does this approach fall short in humanizing the characters, but with scene lengths that run way past their expiration time, it’s also quite boring.
“Armand” also defies credibility for unusually simple reasons. For instance, the parents and staff take long breaks from the main discussion at hand for no apparent reason other than to linger in the school’s shadowy corridors and divulge secrets and feelings that the script otherwise can’t weave in organically. Or take the moment where Elisabeth disrupts the proceedings with a bout of hysteria, breaking out in uncontrollable laughter for minutes on end. The non-response by staff and Jon’s parents in this scene is absurd. By the time that Elisabeth’s interiority is expressed in an imagined, metaphorically overloaded dance sequence, “Armand” had already lost me.
“Armand” Trailer
Michael Clawson is a member of the Seattle Film Critic Society you can follow his passion for film on Letterboxd.