Denne uken ble Erik Poppes film De usynlige anmeldt i det anerkjente filmtidsskriftet Variety. Filmen – som på har fått den engelske tittelen Troubled Water blir i anmeldelsen spådd en lysende fremtid. 

Under filmfestivalen i Haugesund i år ble filmen vist for et internasjonalt publikum for første gang. Som tidligere nevnt i Rushprint, vant Erik Poppes De usynlige prisen for beste spillefilm på Hamptons International Film Festival for et par uker siden.

Og det er ikke bare i Hampton mottakelsene til Poppes film var vært overveldende. Her kan du lese hva filmanmelder Ronnie Scheib skrev om filmen i Variety:

Like Clint Eastwood’s Changeling, Norwegian Erik Poppe’s Troubled Water
highlights two cinematic archetypes that have recently gained currency: The child murderer and the bereaved mother. But here, the two figures form equal sides of the same narrative coin in a brilliantly conceived, magisterially orchestrated drama.

Troubled Water completes a trilogy, and if Poppe has managed to escape major international attention until now, pic’s Hamptons fest awards (it topped the Golden Starfish competition and won an audience award) may signal a sea change that could crest into Arthouses here and abroad.

Troubled Water benefits greatly from a well-executed structural ploy in which the same story is told from two fundamentally different perspectives: The first narrative unfolds without interruption, only to be startlingly subverted by the second.

Pic opens on a theft gone wrong as two teenage kids steal a stroller, resulting in the death of a little boy. Script then skips ahead to follow one of the perpetrators, the now-adult Jan Thomas (Pal Sverre Valheim Hagen), following him upon his release from prison as he reinvents himself as Thomas, a church organist.

At first defensive and withdrawn, communicating mainly through the cathedral’s magnificent pipes, he gradually comes to flourish under the romantic (if not religious) ministrations of the church’s female pastor, Anna (Ellen Dorrit Petersen).

Pic then radically shifts gears to cover the same timespan from the viewpoint of the dead boy’s mother, Agnes (a magnificently unraveling Trine Dyrholm), cutting from her panicked discovery of her son’s disappearance to her present-day, reconstituted family: husband Jon (Trond Espen Seim) and two Third World orphans.

Taking her class on a field trip to church, she recognizes the virtuoso organist as the killer of her child and starts to spiral out of control, impacting everyone around her. When Agnes spies Thomas with Jens, she totally freaks out.

Poppe excels at impelling the pic inexorably forward while simultaneously leaving room for all kinds of unexpected side effects and epiphanies. Thesping is uniformly excellent and slightly offbeat. Tech credits are superb, particularly John Christian Rosenlund’s limpid widescreen lensing.

Les hele anmeldelsen hos Variety.