In this Cannes Caméra d’Or winner, a fraught parent–teacher conference at a Norwegian primary school plunges surreally into a claustrophobic breakdown.

Elisabeth is summoned to a meeting at her son Armand’s sprawling primary school, where she’s staggered to learn there’s been an incident between Armand and six-year-old classmate Jon. This upsets Jon’s parents Sarah and Anders, but the children’s inexperienced teacher and the school’s self-interested, ageing principal are ill-equipped to mediate. There’s a history of bad blood between these parents: Sarah and Elisabeth are estranged friends who’ve known each other since they themselves attended this school, and Sarah is the sister of Elisabeth’s late husband Thomas.

Writer/director Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel – the grandson of Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullmann – demonstrates his cinematic pedigree with this formally adventurous film that subverts expectations at every turn. It begins as a familiar kind of dryly satirical bourgeois psychodrama, before abandoning realism for surreal flourishes that recall the work of Luis Buñuel. Renate Reinsve (A Different Man, MIFF 2024) follows her Cannes Best Actress–winning turn in The Worst Person in the World (MIFF 2021) with an even more bravura performance as Elisabeth, which takes her from hysterical laughing fits to expressionist dance sequences.

“A director impressively carrying his family’s legacy with a vivid, creepy, and uncomfortably funny debut that burrows into the mind.” – IndieWire