Thelma

Thelma leaves her strict Christian parents for university in Oslo, falls for a woman, and starts having seizures during which things happen: birds hit windows, people vanish, a lake freezes.

Joachim Trier, who does not usually make genre films, treats it as a coming-out story in which the repression is literal and dangerous: Thelma has been raised to fear exactly the thing that is now surfacing, and her power is inseparable from her desire.

It is beautifully controlled, closer to Carrie than to anything supernatural, and the film's sympathy is entirely with her against the upbringing that taught her to hate herself.

Eili Harboe is superb.

The swimming pool sequence is the standout and the ending is, unusually for this material, a liberation.