Movie Review: Thelma

Happy Groundhog Day (1993, dir. Harold Ramis)! Here’s a review of a different movie.

I have to preface this review of Thelma (2017, dir. Joachim Trier) by disclosing to the reader that I had a little bit of a personal bias before I sat down to watch this movie. Not because I felt one way or the other about any of the movie-makers or the subject of the film, but because I had to endure the harrowing experience of walking from Brown College to the Rice Media Center by myself in the dark in 118% humidity. I didn’t take the bus because I was paranoid about being late and I thought it would be faster to walk than to wait for the bus. (It was a 40 minute walk due to me going to two of the wrong buildings.) (I was still a half hour early.)

Thelma was disarming in its beauty. I’m not usually married to certain mediums of presentation for art, but I do think there was something worthwhile about seeing this movie on the big screen. I feel like you see a window shatter on your phone screen, and think, “a window shattered,” you see a frozen lake on your laptop screen and think, “yeah, that sure is a lake.” You see the mountains of Norway on a 20-foot screen and think, “20 feet and they still can’t fit the whole mountain in the frame?” You see a frozen lake in your entire field of vision and you feel like you could press your cheek against the ice. I don’t know if I was just sitting too close to the screen, but when I saw that window shatter I flinched. Even if the movie didn’t have subtitles, I think I would have been content to just sit back and let the images happen to me.

Plot-wise, Thelma strays far enough from convention that it’s enjoyable to a variety of audiences without being too disjointed: if you want an art film, it’s an art film with more than one line of dialogue every 10 minutes, if you want a psychological drama, it’s a psychological drama with some levity and romance, if you want a superhero origin story (which it has been called by other critics) it’s...kind of like that? I mean, the only superhero movie I’ve seen to the end was one of Andrew Garfield’s Spiderman movies in my freshman year of high school, but somehow I know that these aren’t exactly the same type of movie. I think superhero movies could be like Thelma if they tried, though. Basically, I don’t know if you’ll like Thelma enough to walk forty minutes in the dark to see it, but if that ends up being the case for you, I don’t think you’ll be too torn up about it once the movie ends.

Written by Rynd M.