Thelma

Snapshot

Thelma is Joachim Trier's fourth feature and his first open turn toward the supernatural. It is a coming-of-age story built on the frame of a psychological thriller. Thelma (Eili Harboe) grew up in a devout Christian household on Norway's west coast and leaves home to study biology at the university in Oslo. There she has a seizure in the library, falls in love with a classmate named Anja (Kaya Wilkins), and comes to understand that her body can act on the world: what she wants, or fears, happens. The film links queer desire, religious repression and inherited trauma, and treats Thelma's power as both illness and liberation.

Trier wrote it with his regular co-writer Eskil Vogt and made it in the austere, controlled register of Scandinavian art cinema. It was widely received as a sophisticated Nordic answer to Carrie, which is a useful comparison but an incomplete one. Norway selected it as its submission for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Critics now treat it as an important bridge in Trier's career, between the intimate realist dramas of his "Oslo" films and the wider formal reach of his later work.

Industry & production

Thelma was produced by Motlys, the Oslo company that has backed Trier's Norwegian features, with Thomas Robsahm as producer. Like most Norwegian art films of its scale, it was financed as a European co-production. Support came from the Norwegian Film Institute's public funding system, which in the 2000s and 2010s sustained a generation of auteur-led Norwegian cinema, along with Nordic and other European partners. The complete list of co-producers and funding bodies is in the film's credits and trade records. It is not summarized here because it was not part of the critical conversation.

The production followed Louder Than Bombs (2015), Trier's English-language, American-set family drama. Thelma brought him back to Norway and to Norwegian-language filmmaking, but he did not return to the small realist scale of his earlier Oslo films. Instead the project took on genre machinery: special effects, animal work, set-piece sequences and a supernatural premise. It premiered on the autumn 2017 festival circuit, including the Toronto International Film Festival, opened in Norway in September 2017, and was distributed internationally, with The Orchard handling the US release. It sat comfortably on the festival circuit and in arthouse distribution while also being marketed to genre audiences, a double positioning that was becoming common for European "elevated" genre films at the time.

Technology

The film's technical profile is that of a well-resourced European art film. It uses widescreen compositions, careful location photography, and digital visual effects used sparingly but decisively. The effects are deliberately restrained: birds striking a library window, a snake moving through a darkened room and across a body, a figure vanishing beneath ice, a body that is suddenly not there. Their power comes from being embedded in otherwise naturalistic images, not from spectacle.

Live animals and digital augmentation are combined in the bird and snake sequences, and possibly elsewhere. The record of specific camera systems, lenses and effects vendors is not part of the film's critical literature and is not stated here. The point that matters is aesthetic: the technology serves a realist surface that the uncanny ruptures.

Technique

Cinematography

Jakob Ihre, who also shot Oslo, August 31st and Louder Than Bombs, photographs the film in cool Nordic tones: winter whites, institutional greys, the dark water of lakes and pools. Two kinds of image organize the film.

The first is the extreme high-angle or aerial view. In the opening, the camera descends from a great height onto a frozen lake. Shortly after, it looks down on the crowded plaza of the Oslo campus and slowly isolates Thelma among the anonymous students. These god's-eye images set up the film's central question of surveillance and judgment, divine and parental, and they return at the end in a rhyming form.

The second is the close, tactile shot of the body: a hand on a thigh in a darkened theatre, a convulsing torso, skin under water. Ihre moves between these scales so that the film keeps switching between the cosmic and the bodily, the watched and the felt.

Editing

Olivier Bugge Coutté, Trier's long-time editor since Reprise, gives the film a measured rhythm for most of its length, with sudden ruptures during the seizure and memory sequences. The narrative depends on delayed revelation. The disappearance of Thelma's infant brother, her mother's disability, and her grandmother's condition are released through flashback at chosen moments, so each new piece of information changes how we read earlier scenes. Trier and Coutté had long used elliptical, associative cutting, which was a signature of Reprise in particular. Here that tendency is put to work for suspense. The seizure scenes in particular use rapid, fragmented cutting and strobing light, which makes the convulsion itself a cinematic event.

Mise-en-scène / staging

The settings make the film's argument through opposition. Thelma's family home by a fjord is isolated, wooded and dominated by water. Oslo is a space of modernist glass and concrete, swimming pools, libraries and lecture halls. The campus ought to mean freedom, but it is staged as exposure, with Thelma constantly surrounded and watched.

Several set pieces are frequently discussed:

• The library seizure: birds gather and strike the glass.
• The ballet or theatre sequence: Anja's hand on Thelma's leg and Thelma's suppressed arousal make a chandelier tremble. The space shakes with desire she cannot admit.
• The swimming pool: Thelma finds herself trapped beneath a dark surface, an image of drowning that ties together the film's recurring motifs of water and ice.
• The snake: it slides over Thelma and into her mouth, a deliberately Edenic image of temptation.

The staging uses religious iconography (the serpent, the burning, the sacrifice) without irony.

Sound

Ola Fløttum, who also scored Louder Than Bombs and later The Worst Person in the World, wrote a score that blends orchestral and choral textures with ominous drones. It leans toward the liturgical in its religious associations. The sound design gives the seizures a sensory signature: sustained tones, breath and distortion. Throughout, silence and environmental sound (ice, water, wind, birds) are used to keep the natural world charged and attentive. The sound is crucial in making Thelma's power felt before it is understood.

Performance

Eili Harboe was then relatively little known internationally. Her performance as Thelma was singled out by critics for its physical commitment, especially in the seizure scenes, and for its restraint. She plays a young woman whose upbringing has taught her to monitor and suppress every impulse, so much of the performance happens in held-back reactions and self-correction. Kaya Wilkins, a musician who performs as Okay Kaya, plays Anja with a looseness and warmth that set off Thelma's tension.

Henrik Rafaelsen and Ellen Dorrit Petersen play the parents with chilling mildness. The father is a doctor, gentle in manner, whose care becomes control. That ambiguity drives the drama: the parents are frightened, grieving and loving, as well as oppressive.

Narrative & dramatic mode

The film is a slow-burn psychological drama that gradually becomes supernatural. It uses the familiar arc of the coming-of-age story (leaving home, first love, independence) and maps onto it the arc of the superpowered outsider who discovers and finally claims her ability.

Ambiguity is sustained for a long time. Doctors first look for epilepsy and then consider psychogenic, non-epileptic seizures. The film lets "repressed desire producing physical symptoms" and "literal telekinetic power" coexist before committing to the second. This matters thematically: the language of hysteria and conversion disorder sits behind the film, with its long history of pathologizing female and queer desire.

Morally, the dramatic mode is unusually open. Thelma's power has killed, and in the climax she sets her father on fire. Yet the ending, in which she restores her mother's ability to walk and walks with Anja on campus, carries the tone of liberation rather than horror. The film declines to resolve whether her power, and her desire, is innocent. Critics divided over whether this ending is triumphant, troubling, or deliberately both.

Genre & cycle

Thelma belongs to several overlapping traditions:

• The telekinetic-girl film: De Palma's Carrie (1976), from Stephen King's novel, is the obvious ancestor, with its religious mother, its sexual awakening as trigger, and power as revenge. Cronenberg's psychosomatic horrors (The Brood, Scanners) are another frequent reference point.
• The European psychological thriller of female repression: Polanski's Repulsion (1965) often appears in critical comparisons.
• The queer coming-of-age film: a cycle that became prominent in 2010s festival cinema.
• The 2010s "elevated" or art-horror cycle: films such as The Witch (2015), It Follows (2014), Raw (2016) and Personal Shopper (2016) brought genre premises into arthouse frames. Thelma's 2017 release placed it directly in this conversation.

It also stands within a specifically Nordic strand of supernatural realism. Let the Right One In (2008) is the major precedent, and the cycle continued with Border (2018), Lamb (2021) and Vogt's own The Innocents (2021). These films treat the uncanny with a straight face, inside cold and naturalistic settings.

Authorship & method

Trier, born in Copenhagen in 1974 and raised in Oslo, came out of skateboard video culture and studied at the National Film and Television School in Britain. His features are made with a stable group of collaborators:

• Eskil Vogt (co-writer): Trier's partner on every feature from Reprise (2006) onward. Vogt is a director in his own right, of Blind (2014) and The Innocents (2021). The Trier–Vogt scripts are known for their structural play, including voice-over, ellipsis, nonlinear memory and counterfactual imagination. In Thelma that sensibility shapes the slow release of backstory.
• Jakob Ihre (cinematographer): shot Oslo, August 31st and Louder Than Bombs. Kasper Tuxen later shot The Worst Person in the World and Sentimental Value.
• Olivier Bugge Coutté (editor): a constant presence across Trier's work.
• Ola Fløttum (composer): a regular collaborator on the later films.

Trier has described the film as a deliberate move into genre. In interviews he spoke of his love of genre cinema and of Hitchcock and De Palma, and of wanting to make a film about a young person's emotional life using the expressive possibilities of the supernatural. Specific quotations are not reproduced here. As method, Thelma keeps his usual concerns (identity under pressure, the weight of family and memory, the cost of self-invention) and moves them from melancholy realism into allegory.

Movement / national cinema

Thelma belongs to the renewal of Norwegian cinema since the early 2000s. That period was supported by reforms to state film financing and produced a cohort of internationally visible directors: Trier, Bent Hamer, Erik Poppe, Vogt, and later Dag Johan Haugerud and Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel. Within it, Trier's work is the most consistently associated with the European festival circuit and with the inheritance of modernist art cinema. Critics place him in a line that runs through Bergman, Antonioni and the French New Wave rather than with Norwegian commercial genre filmmaking.

The film also engages a Nordic cultural backdrop. One element is Scandinavian pietism and lay Christian movements, in which strict religious upbringing remains a recognizable social experience, particularly in western Norway. Another is the Dreyer–Bergman tradition of Scandinavian films about faith, guilt and the female body (Day of Wrath, Ordet, Through a Glass Darkly). Reviewers frequently connected Thelma to this tradition, in which religious anxiety takes physical and sometimes miraculous form. The climactic restoration of the mother's ability to walk can be read as a quiet echo of the resurrection miracle in Ordet. That is an interpretive affinity, not a documented intention.

Era / period

The film is set in the present, the mid-2010s. Smartphones, social media and contemporary student life are taken for granted, which sharpens the contrast with the family's older religious culture. In context it reflects:

• The growing visibility of queer narratives in mainstream European art cinema. Blue Is the Warmest Colour (2013) and Carol (2015) preceded it, and Call Me by Your Name arrived the same year.
• The rise of genre-inflected art cinema, sometimes called "elevated horror," with distributors such as A24 and Neon showing commercial interest in such hybrids.
• An expanding critical discussion of how women's psychological experience has been medicalized, and of horror as a vehicle for that critique.

Themes

• Desire as danger: Thelma's power is triggered and amplified by her desire for Anja. Desire she has been taught to see as sin literally changes the world. The film asks whether the "sin" is the desire or the repression that makes it destructive.
• Faith, guilt and control: The parents' religion works less as theology than as a system of surveillance and self-discipline. The father's medicating of his daughter extends that control into a medical form, and the film links religious and clinical authority.
• Inheritance and family trauma: Thelma's grandmother had the same ability and was sedated into silence. The family secret is therefore generational: women's power has been suppressed by men acting as protectors.
• The body as site of meaning: Seizures, drowning, paralysis and recovery make the film intensely corporeal. Its use of the medical language of psychogenic seizure invokes the history of "hysteria."
• Self-creation and moral ambiguity: The ending lets Thelma choose her life, and her love, by an act that is in part violent. The film neither condemns nor fully absolves her. It treats freedom as something seized, with its costs left visible.
• Nature as witness: Ice, water, birds, deer and serpents give the natural world a quasi-sacred attentiveness, as though creation is responding to Thelma.

Reception, canon & influence

Critical reception. Thelma was received very favourably by international critics on its festival and theatrical release. Reviewers praised its visual control, Harboe's performance, and its fusion of art cinema and supernatural thriller. Many framed it as an intelligent, restrained reimagining of Carrie. Some critics found the final act's moral resolution too tidy, or the allegory too schematic. Others argued that its ambiguity was the point. It was Norway's submission for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film (for the 2018 ceremony) but did not reach the final nominees. It received recognition at Norwegian and Nordic award events. The detailed record of prizes is not reproduced here and should be checked against official sources.

Influences on the film (backward).

• *Brian De Palma's Carrie and Stephen King's novel:* the telekinetic-girl template, the religious household, and sexuality as trigger.
• David Cronenberg: psychosomatic horror in which the mind takes over the body.
• *Hitchcock, especially The Birds:* an image system of birds attacking glass, and suspense built from restrained form.
• The Scandinavian tradition of faith and the body: Dreyer and Bergman, both frequently invoked by reviewers.
• *Polanski's Repulsion:* female psychological disintegration.
• Contemporary Nordic supernatural realism: Let the Right One In above all.

Legacy (forward). Within Trier's career, Thelma expanded his formal vocabulary. Its willingness to use visual effects and stylized set pieces is clearly continuous with the fantastical sequences of The Worst Person in the World (2021), such as the frozen-city interlude and the hallucinatory drug sequence, which brought Trier his widest audience and Oscar nominations. His subsequent Sentimental Value (2025) won the Grand Prix at Cannes.

Its most direct genre descendant is Vogt's The Innocents (2021), which Vogt directed after co-writing Thelma. It is a Norwegian film about children with telekinetic and telepathic abilities, shot in the same naturalistic register, and it is often discussed alongside Thelma as a companion piece. More broadly, Thelma is regularly cited in critical surveys of 2010s art-horror and of queer genre cinema. It helped establish the cycle's later currency in Nordic film, alongside Border and Lamb. Eili Harboe's performance raised her international profile.

Measuring its influence beyond these lines is difficult, and the record of direct borrowings is thin. Its secure place in the canon is as one of the defining hybrid works of its moment. It is a film in which the language of European art cinema and the machinery of supernatural genre became, for a time, almost indistinguishable.