Armand

It’s as a satiric bourgeois psychodrama that “Armand” works best and reveals its genetic heritage to the works of Bergman and Ullmann.

It’s Tøndel’s directorial choices that elevate “Armand,” and also hinder it — he could edit down some of the more outré ideas he plays with here.

Save for those moments when it slips into fantasy, which I'm still struggling with, it is quite masterful

Ms. Reinsve is a talented actress, yet her performance here evokes a kind of pity: She deserves a director who knows when to yell “cut!”

“Armand” is a frustrating, over-long movie that starts with an intriguing premise and then starts fighting it almost immediately.

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.

...the narrative is impeccable, and the creation of suspense and a closed-in atmosphere recalls a notable recent film, The Teachers' Lounge (2023) by Turkish-German director Ilker Catak. [Full review in Spanish]

Armand is at its best when it serves as a showcase for its quartet of talented lead actors, and at its worst when it tries to do anything more complicated than let them run the show

Armand depicts a sensational scenario but buries those sensations in italics and quotation marks&#59; what little it has to say in the first place is muted to a teasing whisper.

Comes off like a film whose director doesn’t entirely trust his screenplay, and so feels compelled to add distracting surrealistic touches to it. What makes that so odd is that the director and the writer are one and the same.