Irish Film Institute -THELMA

THELMA

Director: JOACHIM TRIER

116 mins, 2017, Norway-France-Denmark, Digital, Subtitled


This film was released on Friday 1st December 2017 and is no longer screening.

This film is F-Rated. Find out more here.

A young girl from a fundamentalist religious background experiences the pangs of first love just as she comes to realise she is graced (or perhaps cursed) with telekinetic powers in Norwegian director Joachim Trier’s elegant, intriguing new film.

Shy teenager Thelma (Eili Harboe) has left her rural home and devout Catholic parents to study in Oslo; isolated and lonely, she becomes discreetly infatuated with fellow student Anja (Kaya Wilkins). As her feelings grow stronger, Thelma experiences violent seizures during which she seems capable of manipulating her environment in supernatural ways, yet the nature of these occurrences remains teasingly ambiguous.

Parallels can be drawn to Brian de Palma’s Carrie (1976), another tale of a young woman’s sexual awakening being the catalyst for telekinetic powers, yet the austere and mysterious Thelma is unique.

(Notes by David O’Mahony)

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