A young girl’s mythomania in a disturbing Norwegian thriller

In a formally very accomplished first film, the Finnish-Swedish director Johanna Pyykkö explores her time, lies and identity.

This first feature film by Finnish-Swedish director Johanna Pyykkö tells the story of a few weeks in the life of a young girl in Oslo, a slice of life in which it will prove difficult, if not impossible, for the viewer to untangle truth from fiction. My perfect stranger is released in theaters on July 24, 2024.

Ebba, 18, left her housing project, her mother and her sister, who has Down syndrome, to live in a small studio in the basement of a cozy house in a wealthy residential area of ​​Oslo. Ebba works for a cleaning company and regularly takes care of her sister. The young girl observes the neighborhood, Oslo’s golden youth, imagining herself as part of it.

Her owners, when they leave for a month on vacation, give her the keys to the house. A few days later, she finds a man in the port of Oslo on her way home from work. The man, injured in the head, seems to have lost his memory. She takes advantage of this amnesia to move in with him in her owners’ house, making him believe that he is her boyfriend…

The director sets her plot in a setting, a geographical and social context: Oslo, its rich and poor neighborhoods, its night workers, its immigrants with more or less legal activities, its inhabitants who live in beautiful, opulent houses, the fjord at their feet.

But very quickly, what could seem like a social chronicle turns into a psychological thriller, with a scenario that installs us in a constant tension, in the exclusive point of view of its female character, Ebba, a young girl who lies at every turn, and abuses a man she manipulates like a toy.

What is true, what is a lie in the story we are told of this slice of life, of this encounter, and of the events that unfold between the departure and the return of the owners? Is what is shown reality or mystification?

The director plays with sets, accessories, costumes, objects – like these little faceless terracotta figurines, which open and close the film – to better lose the viewer in the twists and turns of a story biased by what in literature we would call an “unreliable narrator”.

Very successful on a formal level, with original but never gratuitous staging effects, this unique first feature film is carried by the young actress Camilla Godø Krohn and her magnetic presence. A 4:3 format, very tight shots of the face and eyes of Ebba’s character, yet impenetrable, often blurred backgrounds, meticulous work on the sound.

All these staging processes feed the confusion, to the point of unease, with this impression for the spectator of being locked in the character’s head without understanding or grasping what is really happening there. A treasure hunt in which it becomes fun to try to find clues to untangle the true from the false.

My perfect stranger offers a reflection on lying, on the relationship between a real life and a dream life, on the propensity to project oneself into a personal, intimate fiction, to extract oneself from reality, which is sometimes unbearable. THE The film also questions identity, and what remains of us when we live in lies, or when the memory of what we were has completely evaporated. With, at the center of all this, the possibility (or not) of a true romantic encounter.

Gender : Doar
Director: Johanna Pyykkö
Actors: Camilla Godø Krohn, Radoslav Vladimirov, Maya Amina Mustache Thuv
Country : Norway
Duration : 1h47
Exit : July 24 2024
Distributer : Pyramid Distribution
Synopsis : Ebba, a lonely 18-year-old woman, works in the port of Oslo. One evening, she discovers a man of great beauty on land, injured in the head. Realizing that he has amnesia, she makes him believe that they are lovers and builds them a universe built on lies. But gradually, Ebba understands that the worst deceptions may not come from her…