Thelma is a superhero horror movie about the terror of growing up
There’s a proud tradition in genre films of using the supernatural as a metaphor for the horrors of adolescence. Traversing that strange no-man’s-land between childhood and adulthood is a real-world horror show in its own right, full of strange discoveries, odd awakenings, and the slow, dawning realization that our childhood identities may not be our final identities. There’s an inevitable loss of control plus the terror of the unknown wrapped up together. This is an almost irresistible target for a storyteller trying to get under an audience’s skin.
Those ideas are clearly on the mind of Norwegian filmmaker Joachim Trier with his latest film Thelma. The story of a young college student who begins to realize she has strange, telekinetic…
