Winner of the Caméra d’Or as the best debut film at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, “Armand” begins as a tense classroom confrontation between ineffectual school staff and the parents of two boys who were in some kind of playground altercation. The film, which is Norway’s entry in the Oscars Best International Feature Film category, grows stranger, creepier and more stylized as it progresses, highlighted by a couple of disturbing dance sequences and an occasionally unhinged performance by Renate Reinsve (“The Worst Person in the World”).
It marks an auspicious debut from director Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel, whose grandparents were a pair of cinema legends, Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullmann.