25/32
This is a truly rare achievement
Line of Events
Armand, a 6-year-old boy, is accused of crossing the line with his best friend in elementary school. Norway’s official submission for the “Best International Feature Film” category at the 97th Academy Awards in 2025. Norwegian films are usually of low international standards, but here is a film that manages to achieve exceptionally low Norwegian standards. The film mostly looks like it was made by first-year film school students. These students decided to make an experimental film that had never been seen before, and they succeeded.
It’s just exceptionally bad
However, they forgot a few things. Among other things, they forgot that even bad films have some tricks in their scripts to keep the audience hooked until the end, some cliffhanger or other cinematic techniques. This film has none of that. It’s also undoubtedly the cheapest film ever made. The costs are limited to the actors, the camera, the lighting and the sound crew, and no one is technically challenged in any scene.
They didn’t even bother with the sets
If you are strong enough to hold a camera and a microphone, you can make this film. The film is set entirely in the hallways and rooms of a school. It’s a school, a county school, and it was probably rented for free. The actors don’t do a bad job outright. But it’s hard for actors to do a particularly bad job – it takes a particularly bad director to make actors look bad.
The 0 is simply because it doesn’t deserve a 1
So, strictly speaking, it’s not the actors’ fault that the film is terrible. However, since they agreed to take the roles, it will be part of their filmography to have been in Armand. You can’t give the film a 0, but if you did, it would deserve it. Incidentally, this is Norway’s contribution to this year’s Oscars. The Norwegian Oscar committee decided that this was the best film from Norway this year.
By comparison, Sweden and Denmark both have dozens
How they came to this conclusion is a mystery, considering there have been quite a few bad Norwegian films 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. This film, by traveling to the United States and being nominated for the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, proves to the entire film industry that Norway is – in many practical ways – a nation without a functioning filmmaking environment.