Thelma (2017)

Joachim Trier's Thelma follows a sheltered young woman from an ultra-religious Norwegian family as she arrives at university in Oslo, suffers seizures, and discovers that her desire for a fellow student named Anja triggers psychokinetic powers she cannot control. The film treats this attraction as the engine of the entire plot: Thelma's guilt, her father's cruelty, the literal vanishing of the woman she loves, and the eventual resurrection of that love all orbit her sexuality. This is a queer supernatural romance in the fullest sense, and it earns its place in the canon without a single speech about acceptance. The romance is the story, not a subplot bolted onto it.

The film operates squarely in the female Gothic tradition, with a young woman caught between repression and desire, her body both a prison and an instrument of enormous power. Women here are victims and agents at once, and the narrative grants Thelma the full arc of liberation, from self-loathing to healing her paralyzed mother and willing her lover back into being. The framing is intimate and unhurried, more concerned with the texture of loneliness than with argument. It presents its ideas through image and mood, and it trusts the audience to keep up.

The cast is monochrome Norwegian, the setting homogeneous, and the film has no interest in the concerns of climate, capital, or representation for its own sake. Its supernatural seizures are a metaphor for forbidden want, not a clinical portrait of anything neurological. What distinguishes the whole enterprise is its refusal to lecture. There is no sermon here, no scene in which a character explains the theme to the congregation. The film simply lets a repressed girl set her father on fire and then bring her girlfriend back from nothing. Restraint, in this instance, reads as confidence, and the result is a quiet, unnerving piece of work that says what it means without ever raising its voice.