AVClub: Louder Than Bombs, the first English-language movie from Norwegian director Joachim Trier (Reprise, Oslo, August 31st), plays like an adaptation of some imaginary classic of modern literature, the kind you always assumed was too interior to ever be properly translated to the screen. The film takes a familiar, almost universal premise—the aftermath of a death in the family—and explores it through an intoxicating mélange of flashbacks, dream sequences, dream sequences within flashbacks, multiple narrators, poems transformed into feverish montage, and scenes staged and then restaged from different perspectives. These stylistic tricks open windows into the hearts and minds of the characters. They also make a movie about people grappling privately with their emotions feel energetic, even thrilling, in its own melancholic way.
We Got This Covered
If, by chance, you understand small doses of behavioral psychology, it should come as no surprise that a film titled Louder Than Bombs is one of the year’s most sonically silent emotional odysseys. Verbal declarations can easily be twisted, manipulated, and construed however the speaker or audience may desire, but it’s what’s held inside that echoes like a scream.
