4 Best Movies In Norwegian On Cineplex Canada

Staff & contributors
Find the best Norwegian-language movies to watch. These movies in Norwegian are: highly-rated by critics, highly-rated by viewers, and handpicked by our staff.

The film opens with Julie in her early twenties, longing to pursue a career in medical school. But after briefly testing the waters, she switches over to psychology, only to drop completely out of school and transform her hobby of photography into a professional career. This indecisiveness carries over in most aspects of her life, including and especially in romance, where impulse and desire drive her to run after what she believes to be love. The movie follows Julie as she navigates adulthood in modern Oslo—at once a specific yet universally relatable story about the growing pains of growing up.

With The Worst Person in the World, Joachim Trier scores again with another life-changing Norwegian drama about longing, love, grief, and finding your place in the world. His films can be quite sad but amidst all the drama, moments of happiness and hope are scattered throughout, as it is in real life.

Genre: Comedy, Drama, Romance

Actor: Anders Danielsen Lie, Anna Dworak, Gisle Tveito, Hans Olav Brenner, Herbert Nordrum, Ine Jansen, Maria Grazia Di Meo, Marianne Krogh, Renate Reinsve, Ruby Dagnall, Sofia Schandy Bloch, Thea Stabell, Vidar Sandem

Director: Joachim Trier

The Painter and the Thief opens with a great hook: an artist tracks down and confronts the man who stole her painting. In a surprising turn, the two become close and develop an intimacy that deepens when she begins to paint the troubled man.

Yet, director Benjamin Ree pushes past where other documentarians would have been content to stop, and instead begins to deconstruct the very narrative we’ve followed up till now. At its core, this is a film about the way we tell stories about ourselves and others, and how often people don’t fit into the neat categories we set out for them.

Genre: Documentary, Drama

Actor: Bjørn Inge Nordland, Karl-Bertil Nordland

Director: Benjamin Ree

The Innocents is a Norweigan thriller that follows four kids who discover they have supernatural powers over the summer. They play around and experiment in the woods nearby, but what begins as harmless fun quickly develops into something much more disturbing and sinister.

This unnerving film, a blend of fantasy and horror, doesn't waste time explaining the origins of its mysticism. Instead, it goes straight into action—bending, twisting, and splitting open anything and anyone that gets in its way. This kind of rawness is shocking given the age range of the characters, but it also works to subvert what we've come to expect from kids, youth, and goodness. The Innocents isn't for the faint of heart, but if you can manage some bloody and unhindged scenes, then it's sure worth checking out. Directed by Eskil Vogt, co-writer of critically-acclaimed films like Thelma and The Worst Person in the World

Genre: Drama, Fantasy, Horror, Thriller

Actor: Alva Brynsmo Ramstad, Ellen Dorrit Petersen, Irina Eidsvold Tøien, Lisa Tønne, Marius Kolbenstvedt, Mina Yasmin Bremseth Asheim, Morten Svartveit, Rakel Lenora Fløttum, Sam Ashraf

Director: Eskil Vogt

Though it doesn't provide a more holistic view of Chinese society even in the context of work and industry, Ascension remains an impressive collection of images that manage to be both awe-inspiring and disconcerting. The film deliberately chooses not to take a stance on any of the things we see on screen, which makes for a uniquely challenging experience for the active viewer; many images that we might initially describe as dystopian here are usually followed by scenes that remind us of the humanity working within these capitalist structures. What you really end up learning from Ascension may be limited in scope, but getting to see modern life presented this way is still a unique opportunity.

Genre: Documentary

Director: Jessica Kingdon