‘Armand’ Review: When a School Is a Trap

But for most of its running time, “Armand,” which Tondel also wrote, feels more like a realist drama, the kind in which a school stands in for the whole of society, much like the 2023 film “The Teacher’s Lounge.” Elisabeth (Renate Reinsve), the woman in the car, is the single mother of 6-year-old Armand, who has done a disturbing thing to a classmate. That classmate’s parents, Sarah and Anders (Ellen Dorrit Petersen and Endre Hellestveit), are headed to the school as well for a meeting about the situation. The headmaster (Oystein Roger) and the school counselor (Vera Veljovic) have decided to put a junior teacher named Sunna (Thea Lambrechts Vaulen) in charge of the meeting. She may be in over her head.

There’s a lot of sitting and talking in classrooms, and a lot of taking breaks so people can go to the bathroom or tend to a nosebleed. The meeting progresses in fits and starts, which is as annoying to the characters as it is to the audience: Just when things get started, the attendees stop, get up, go somewhere. We move in and out of the classroom with them, back and forth through the halls, the place eventually starting to appear like a maze in which every hallway simply leads to some place we feel like we’ve already been.

These are bold choices on Tondel’s part, elliptical and elusive, constantly leaving us guessing where the characters stand in relation to one another. (That Tondel is the grandson of Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullman seems appropriate for this kind of narrative structure.) Slowly, additional information trickles out that changes how we look at each person. We are bystanders, shifting our judgments and wondering why we made those judgments in the first place.

The best element of “Armand” is its star. Reinsve, as Elisabeth, seems like she is in a different universe from everyone else in the school, which is both the point and appropriate to the character: Elisabeth is an outsider, a successful actress whose work causes the other parents to look at her askance.

Reinsve is beautiful and can conjure misery and mischief in the same breath, her smile equally capable of taunting or encouraging someone. She was terrific as a self-absorbed woman learning something about maturity in “The Worst Person in the World” from 2021; here she’s similarly charismatic but also explosive, at one point responding to the accusations against her son in helpless laughter that goes on for what feels like hours. It’s a physical and dynamic performance that shows her range, and when she is onscreen it’s mesmerizing.