‘Armand’ Review: When a School Is a Trap

Technically, “Armand” is not a folk horror movie. Technically, it’s not a horror movie at all. But the director Halfdan Ullmann Tondel wants us to wonder what we’re in for from the very start. First we see, in claustrophobically panicky close-up shots, a woman blazing down the road in her car. She’s speaking urgently on the phone to someone named Armand, asking if he is OK. Something is clearly wrong.

Then we’re at a school, and the camera glides along the hallways slowly, as if it is a ghost observing the surroundings that we — and she — are about to enter. Ominous music plays. Something bad is lurking.

What the bad thing is takes a while to unfold, and no, it’s not a monster. (Not exactly.) Instead, “Armand” is about the way harm, perpetuated across generations, causes communities to turn insular. Outsiders threaten established order, and must be dealt with accordingly. It’s this theme that makes the film feel like folk horror.

But for most of its running time, “Armand,” which Tondel also wrote, feels more like a realist drama, the kind in which a school stands in for the whole of society, much like the 2023 film “The Teacher’s Lounge.” Elisabeth (Renate Reinsve), the woman in the car, is the single mother of 6-year-old Armand, who has done a disturbing thing to a classmate. That classmate’s parents, Sarah and Anders (Ellen Dorrit Petersen and Endre Hellestveit), are headed to the school as well for a meeting about the situation. The headmaster (Oystein Roger) and the school counselor (Vera Veljovic) have decided to put a junior teacher named Sunna (Thea Lambrechts Vaulen) in charge of the meeting. She may be in over her head.

There’s a lot of sitting and talking in classrooms, and a lot of taking breaks so people can go to the bathroom or tend to a nosebleed. The meeting progresses in fits and starts, which is as annoying to the characters as it is to the audience: Just when things get started, the attendees stop, get up, go somewhere. We move in and out of the classroom with them, back and forth through the halls, the place eventually starting to appear like a maze in which every hallway simply leads to some place we feel like we’ve already been.