Thelma (2017)

When you hear of a film about supernatural power, you usually picture flashy action or a heroic epic. But Thelma, made by the Norwegian director Joachim Trier, goes in the opposite direction. Here, the power is not a weapon that explodes but a passage through which a repressed girl’s inner life finally leaks out. Layering psychological thriller, horror, and coming-of-age within the skin of a calm Nordic drama, the work blurs the boundaries of genre and slowly draws the viewer in.

What it’s about — A girl whose repression leaks out as supernatural power

Thelma (Eili Harboe), raised in a strict Christian household, leaves her parents for the first time to enroll at a university in Oslo. Amid the unfamiliar freedom, she is strongly drawn to a fellow student, Anja (Kaya Wilkins), and from the moment she becomes aware of that feeling, inexplicable seizures begin. Each time a seizure occurs, unexplainable things happen around her. A flock of birds strikes a window, lights flicker, a person vanishes. Thelma realizes that an uncontrollable power sleeps within her body, and following the source of that power, she comes face to face with repressed memories of her childhood.

Direction — A mirror of the psyche built from suggestion rather than shock

Even while dealing with supernatural events, Joachim Trier never relies on genre shocks. His direction is filled with restraint and suggestion. Each seizure scene is a carefully designed visual event, yet it is not horror for horror’s sake but functions as a mirror revealing Thelma’s psychological state. The scene of Thelma floating beneath the surface of a swimming pool, as if trapped under ice, is a masterful image that compresses her repressed desire and guilt into a single shot.

The film never clearly separates, to the very end, what is real and what is Thelma’s fantasy. Trier makes this ambiguity not a weakness but a weapon. The audience assimilates to Thelma’s unstable gaze and passes through the confusion and fear she feels alongside her. Cold tones, static imagery, and ominous sound that abruptly intrudes drape a strange tension over the entire film.

Performance — A change painted through gazes and minute expressions

Eili Harboe’s performance is the heart of this film. Through the character of Thelma, she delicately paints a complex interior in which innocence and fear, desire and guilt are entangled. Her acting, conveying the character’s change through gaze and minute expression alone without large gestures, is the core that keeps the film from losing the audience’s immersion. Harboe convincingly shows the process by which the initially withdrawn Thelma gradually grows firmer as she accepts her identity and her power.

Her counterpart, Kaya Wilkins, plays Anja, the object of Thelma’s attraction, as alluring yet ambiguous. The emotional line between the two forms the film’s emotional center, and because that tremor comes across as genuine, the later developments carry greater weight.

What the film says — Liberation, severing guilt to live as oneself

Thelma borrows the device of supernatural power to speak of repression. When a person’s desire is crushed in the name of religion and family, the film unravels in metaphor how that pent-up energy distorts and erupts. Thelma’s process of accepting her sexual identity and her power is, at the same time, the process of breaking free from the guilt her parents imposed. What the film’s ending shows is not simple revenge but the choice of one person to sever the chains that bound her and live as herself.

Ratings & reception

By OMDb, the IMDb rating is 6.9. Its Rotten Tomatoes freshness is a very high 92%, and its Metacritic score reaches 74. Critics especially praised Trier’s direction, which twists genre conventions yet never loses psychological depth, and Harboe’s performance. To some viewers expecting sensational developments the pacing may feel slow, but the completeness built up through atmosphere and metaphor won strong critical support.

Verdict

Thelma is a coming-of-age tale and a drama of liberation wearing the skin of a supernatural film. Digging deep into the character’s inner life in place of dazzling spectacle, this film twists the frame of genre to reach a more universal story. It is calm yet never bland, ambiguous yet leaves an ultimately clear message. It is a thoughtful, beautiful work that lacks nothing in earning four stars.

Recommended for

• Viewers who love psychological dramas that twist genre conventions
• Those drawn to stories about repression, liberation, and identity
• Anyone who enjoys the calm, chilly atmosphere distinctive to Nordic film