These elements are in almost every Norwegian movie post-2000 including Everybody hates Johan:
1) An unsympathetic, sexually frustrated, emotionally stunted man at odds with the "Jante Law" or bygdedyret (the small-town mentality).
2) Low stakes.
3) Events happen, but there is no real plot.
4) Weird moral choices and alien psychology/motivations.
5) Nature and silence.
6) Nothing of value at its core.
7)"It's just like real life" as an excuse to make a boring, sad movie about nothing.
At one point, I paused the movie in anger. It was so frustrating to watch event after event unfold ("this happens, then this happens, then this"), often tragic and pointless. It seems the soul of the character is revealed through his love of nature, emphasised by a well-placed swear word. That's the character. A stoic (or emotionally distant) man who loves to blow stuff up.
When the movie ended, I felt just as numb as the main character. What have I been watching?
By Norwegian standards, this is a mass-produced movie. It has all the tropes. By the end, I was ambivalent. There were, as in most movies, certain things and characters I liked, but the "story" is "driven" by stupidity, apathy, and vague feelings.
"But it's just like real life! Things just happen." I guess that will be the counterargument here. Yeah, and almost every Norwegian movie is like this-low stakes, a "character study" of a man of no importance.
Without going into spoilers, I'm sure many will claim the ending created true connections and is more emotionally resonant than the rest of the movie. But so many bad choices were made, so much time was wasted, only to end on the same note.
I suppose I could rate it as an "art film," where themes and mood take precedence over entertainment value. But from a Norwegian perspective, it feels mass-produced, with a message that has been told many times before: "Just exist, learn nothing, and then you die."
