WILD BEASTS
2017 · 10m · Norway
Directed by Sverre Kvamme
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, LGBTQ+
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
In wintry Northern Norway, surrounded by a wild group of kids, a young boy's impulses are affected by his attraction to his best friend.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a coming-of-age film about queer desire in the Arctic—competent, even moving, but it plays the emotional beats exactly as expected, and there's nothing here that genuinely upends the form or makes me uncomfortable in the way the best work does.
Kvamme situates this quietly within the Scandinavian minimalist tradition—restraint in the edit, a palette of snow and silence, the vulnerability of adolescence treated with formal precision—but it doesn't quite achieve the dialectical rigor of its influences.
The decision to keep the other kids as a restless, almost feral presence in the frame—never sentimentalizing them, letting them move through the boy's intimate moment without softening—is what makes this work: it's the specificity of that choice that transforms a familiar premise into something genuinely felt.