A tender, sensitively observed first feature from Norway’s Eivind Landsvik, “Low Expectations” makes its home in the same Oslo where Joachim Trier and Dag Johan Haugerud set their quiet, introspective films. There’s a dreamily diffuse quality to the Nordic capital that befits the strain of empathetic naturalism that’s emanated of late from the country’s cinema. Amid the city’s serene, encouraging stillness, characters in the process of personal growth can come of age despite their stops and starts, on whatever timetable comes organically.
Debuting in the Directors’ Fortnight section at Cannes, “Low Expectations” marks the acting debut of Marie Ulven, better known as “girl in red”. Under that name, the 27-year-old Norwegian musician has specialized in synth-laden bedroom-pop anthems that sound at once ambient and stadium-ready, with bright melodies and spiky, shiny guitar riffs running an electric charge through her intimate, relatable lyricism. Deeply personal in their exploration of mental health and sexuality, these songs lay bare Ulven’s inner battles with brain chemistry as often as they find her nursing crushes on close friends or dancing with girls at the club. (Not for nothing has “Hey, do you listen to girl in red?” become lesbian shorthand.) In “Low Expectations,” starring as Maja, a musician who falls into depression as her popularity soars, Ulven delicately draws upon her career trajectory—including struggles with OCD and anxiety that spiked during the pandemic and found their way into her debut album—to form the aching foundation of a character whose sadness and self-doubt is threatening to stall her out.
Crushed under the pressure of global stardom and a record deal advance, as well as with deteriorating confidence and self-image, Maja moves back in with her supportive but frustrated mother (Tone Monstrum) and starts working part-time as an exam invigilator at a local high school. Recognized from her expansive social-media following by some students, though most leave her alone, Maja forms a friendship with senior school administrator Johannes (Trier regular Anders Danielsen Lie), who senses her loneliness and gently tries to reach through it. She also bonds with a student dancer (Embla Berntsen) who has followed Maja’s career out of both admiration for her music and curiosity as to how she might pursue her own passions.
Landsvik’s favored tone is one of witty, reassuring optimism, assisted by the wistful hues of 16mm cinematography by Andreas Bjørseth. Certain scenes in “Low Expectations,” including a particular standout set in a clothing store, strike a ruefully funny note, and his script occasionally expands to encompass an entertaining aside—like one in which Johannes and fellow teacher Oscar, played by Snorre Kind Monsson, bond over their shared obsession with Michael Mann’s “Heat.” But these touches are carefully judged, and a similar balance is struck with the heavier scenes where Maja’s mental crisis makes itself apparent. On the whole, the film is so patient and measured as to feel practically palliative, with Ulven’s magnetic and refreshingly unaffected lead performance extending to it a perfectly lo-fi type of star power. This is a showcase for Ulven’s acting abilities more than her music, though the original song she contributes is also memorably poignant (and surely another selling point for girl in red’s fanbase.) You’ll come away from the film—like Maja—at once lightly soothed and quietly nourished.
A more unsettling type of entrancement awaits in “Death Has No Master,” a Venezuelan drama from Jorge Thielen Armand—also in Directors’ Fortnight—about a woman named Caro (Asia Argento) who returns to her father’s cacao plantation in order to sell it, only to discover unwelcome occupants who conjure forth demons of their family’s colonial heritage.
An ominous, slow-simmering postcolonial giallo that channels the subgenre popularized by Italian horror maestros like Lucio Fulci and Dario Argento in more ways than just its central casting of Argento’s daughter, the film picks up as Caro arrives back in Venezuela after years living elsewhere, determined to set her father’s affairs in order and to extract any remaining profits from his crumbling estate. Arriving at the decrepit property with the dense ambience of the surrounding jungle deafening her on all sides, Caro discovers that its mansion is still occupied—by its current caretaker, Sonia (Dogreika Tovar, a non-professional actor who emerges as the film’s most spellbinding player), daughter of the previous caretaker, and her young son (Yermain Sequera), as well as another tenant (José Aponte) and an elder named Yoni (Arturo Rodriguez), who watched Caro grow up.
All are cautiously tolerant of Caro’s presence, though it’s immediately clear from her pink “Amore Amore” T-shirt, expensive shoes, and chunky designer sunglasses—not to mention her haughty, imperious demeanor—that she’s a foreigner in this country she lays claim to. As Roque warns Caro, “If you’re going to sell, sell quickly, because these lands will swallow you up.” At first perturbed, then incensed, by the presence of “squatters,” as she calls them, Caro vows to push them out of the family mansion, though the local police advise her to let the matter go, on account of how many years Sonia and the others—already well-known to the provincial and tight-knit community—have lived there. But Caro, smarting from decades of barely suppressed familial trauma tied up in her relationship to her father and the property she has inherited, can’t do that. Her tactics instead grow desperate and duplicitous, leading all involved down a dark, lawless path—and pulling “Death Has No Master” into a sanguinary spiral.
With the specter of slavery embodied by former plantation workers who still roam the jungles, wielding spears and speaking allegorically of the land as an entity that can be controlled by an occupying power but never wholly owned, Thielen Armand deepens the postcolonial tensions between Caro and Sonia, even as this side of the story settles for a more primal resonance in comparison to films like “White Material” and “Chocolat,” by Claire Denis, that have excavated the complex barriers and betrayals of everyday postcolonial existence more completely. Instead, methodically guiding his film toward its bloodthirsty denouncement, Thielen Armand steeps it first in an atmosphere of miasmic, pulsating dread, suggesting a hypnagogic inevitability to the fates of his characters. Oppressive sound design envelops all, compounding the desolation of the humid hacienda setting, and is afforded greater dimension by the ominously throbbing drumbeats of its score.
There’s comparatively far less conveyed here on the level of dialogue, and Argento—who reportedly learned Spanish for this underwritten role—is most effective in channeling Caro’s eruptions of venomous rage and entitlement, the visceral sense of a character being corroded from the inside out by emotions carved into her at an early age. “Death Has No Master” successfully accrues tension ahead of its explosive finale, one that pays off the story’s slow boil with an outward spiral of violence brutal enough to stain the soil red, Peckinpah-style, while solidifying its larger ideas about cycles of colonial oppression and the annihilation they are still capable of enacting when passed down through generations.
Over in the Critics’ Week sidebar section, Sara Ishaq’s Yemen-set drama “The Station” trains its gaze on an oasis of female solidarity amid a raging regional conflict. With their country ripped asunder now more than a decade ago by a civil war that continues today, the Yemeni people still struggle to endure war-torn daily circumstances. Upon reportedly learning from family members about a real, female-only fuel station in Sanaa, Yemen’s capital city, Ishaq—here making her narrative feature debut after directing the Oscar-nominated short documentary “Karama Has No Walls,” about the 2011 Yemeni uprising—was moved to craft a fictional story around Layal (Manal Al-Maliki), a resourceful woman tasked with managing this essential business. Shot in Jordan with a cast of largely non-professional actors, Ishaq’s film is a Critics’ Week highlight, paying tense and powerful tribute to the resilience of Yemeni women under cycles of patriarchal violence.
As “The Station” gets underway, Layal’s efforts to make ends meet at her small station—which, in addition to carefully rationing out gasoline in jerrycans, sells “contraband” material like school textbooks, lingerie, feminine care products, and contraceptives—often revolve around insulating it from the threat of violence that otherwise hangs heavy in the air (literally, with fighter jets loudly tearing through the skies—across Sanaa). A sign outside the station’s gated compound reads: “No men, no weapons, no politics,” a proclamation of purpose that Layal fights to protect. Though she’s been able to maintain this sanctuary with the conditional support of a sheikh’s wife (Shorooq Mohammed), there’s nothing secure about Layal’s existence.
When her 12-year-old brother Latih (Rashad Alrajeh), typically confined to the compound as the sole male in its all-women environment, attracts unwanted attention from nearby soldiers and bureaucrats who believe he’s old enough to enlist, Layal—who has already lost an older brother to the fighting—struggles to save him from a similar fate. As she submits to paying bribes to ensure Latih can remain at home, Layal comes into contact with her estranged sister Shams (Abeer Mohammed), whose arrival—along with her differing, harsher opinions about what will be required to keep Latih safe—further complicates matters.
Ishaq’s film operates along two intriguing parallel tracks, bringing viewers inside the fuel stop’s private sanctuary of Yemeni women—whose community is a welcoming safe space, alive with little shows of solidarity and light-hearted banter—as it expands subtly outward to acknowledge the cultural and societal tensions of the seldom-seen world outside the station. One result of this is that we gradually learn more about the various pressures shaping Latih. Even as Layal strives to shield him from the outside environment, he’s sensitive to the camaraderie that other boys and the soldiers in surrounding areas seem to enjoy, and a new friendship with the tall, ungainly Ahmad—a 13-year-old who serves as Shams’ chaperone, per the region’s religiously restrictive laws—prompts Latih to grow up faster than Layal is prepared for. Consistently well-performed, nicely photographed, and surprisingly earnest even as the story takes several darker turns en route to a conclusion that—though foregone—still manages to pack an emotional punch, “The Station” is an emotionally resonant drama that augurs well for Ishaq’s future in narrative film.
