2002 (YEAR OF THE HORSE)
2021 · 10m · Norway
Directed by Mathias Nordli Eriksen, Matias Rygh
Genres: coming-of-age, dark comedy, drama
Tones: darkly comic, tender, tense
On a winter night in Oslo in 2002, teenagers Noah and Ingrid declare their love upstairs while her parents are in the midst of breaking up downstairs.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The dual-collapse structure—two relationships unraveling in parallel—feels like it should be cute-sad teen fodder, but Eriksen and Rygh somehow make the symmetry feel genuinely unsettling rather than neat; that's the kind of tonal tightrope most shorts can't walk.
A precisely calibrated chamber piece that understands the Dogme tradition of intimacy and constraint; the vertical geography of the house—upstairs innocence, downstairs rupture—echoes the spatial formalism of Nordic minimalism without ever feeling derivative.
The sound design choice of letting the parents' argument bleed into the teenagers' confession creates this unbearable acoustic intimacy that costs nothing to execute but rewires the entire emotional grammar of the scene.
Reviews
That awkward moment as a teen when you have to meet your date's parents. Never fun. But what happens in this short is the worst kind of experience.