'Thelma' puts a spellbinding supernatural twist on the coming-of-age drama
Everyone has to grow up sometime. That doesn't make it any less terrifying when you're the one going through it.
Perhaps that's why coming-of-age narratives seem so ripe for horrific reinterpretation. This year alone, we've seen a vet student fight cannibalistic urges in Raw, a young mermaid betrayed by her first love in The Lure, and an entire clique of kids experience their darkest fears made manifest in It.
Now comes Thelma, which filters a young woman's sexual awakening through a paranormal lens. Thelma (Eili Harboe) has just arrived at college, and has begun the process of discovering herself – what she believes, what she wants, what she's capable of.
Her tentative forays into new friendships and college parties will feel familiar to just about anyone who's gone away to college. The sudden seizures that may or may not have supernatural origins will feel much less so.
And yet, there's something relatable about those, too. Thelma is, at its heart, a classic coming-of-age drama – or, as director Joachim Trier described it to me, a "coming-into-who-you-really-are story, which deals very often with the loss of control or existential themes."
In Thelma's case, it's her desire for a fellow classmate, Anja (Kaya Wilkins) that unmoors her. It doesn't seem to be a coincidence that Thelma suffers her first seizure moments after she lays eyes on Anja for the very first time. Her attraction to Anja is that overwhelming – and, in large part due to her conservative Christian upbringing, that frightening.
But if the seizures represent Thelma's weakness, her inability to resist this force of nature, they also represent her power. Strange things seem to happen around Thelma when they strike.
While Thelma is an original character, created just for this movie by Trier and his writing partner Eskil Vogt, she taps into a long history of women whose desires push them into the margins, and whose agency and ambition turn them into demons.
She echoes both the superheroes of today (Thelma could be an X-Men origin story with a few small tweaks) and the sorceresses of yesteryear. Indeed, Trier revealed that the idea driving Thelma, early on, was to "talk about the witch as a concept in Norwegian culture."
Trier explained that old Norwegian fairy tales were verbal traditions, and were only written down in the 19th century. "By that time, Norway had become very bourgeois, very protestant Christian, very conservative in its attitudes," he said.
Witches and their ilk, which had once been portrayed as "magical positive characters – they had, by the 1860s and 1970s, become these stigmatized, evil, hedonistic characters that weren't accepted by the church."
Thelma's not unlike her predecessors in that sense. Her parents are strict religious types; while they seem to mean well, their overprotectiveness of Thelma borders on creepy from the get-go. They insist on obedience and repression, apparently unable to accept the person their daughter really is.
"There’s something perverse and horrific about this family story," Trier told me. In the way that David Lynch (a favorite of Trier's) exposed the dark underbelly of America's white-picket-fence suburbs, Trier continued, "I'm trying to invert these classical images of Norwegian family life."
At the same time, Thelma's too smart and empathetic to turn any of its characters into two-dimensional villains. Even her parents, odd as they may seem, have their reasons for being who they are and doing what they do.
Meanwhile, Thelma, for all her mysterious powers and marginalized desires, isn't a monster or a victim or a hero. She's all of those and none of those at once – all the way up through the film's powerful ending, which Trier told me has been getting "a lot of interesting different reactions."
Some see it as "beautiful and empowering," while others see it as "a narcissistic nightmare." What you think of it may say as much about you as it does about the movie.
In other words, the supernatural Thelma is the coming-of-age experience in a nutshell: It's all about finding out who you are, with all the invigorating uncertainty and ambiguity that entails.
