‘Turn me on, dammit’ Opens in New York on 30 March

At 15 years old, Alma (Helene Bergsholm) is feeling confined in a small mountain town in Norway. She’s miserable and confused in the usual teenage sense, flipping off the town sign whenever she passes it, and dreaming of life elsewhere. Specifically, she’s dreaming of a boy in her class, Artur (Matias Myren), whom she imagines climbing in her bedroom window on moonlit nights. When not indulging in this fantasy, she rings up a sizeable bill on a phone sex line. But the coming of age story in Turn me on, dammit (Få meg på, for faen) — its title tweaked and opening 30 March at the Angelika Film Center and The Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center — takes a turn when an encounter with Artur doesn’t go quite as Alma hopes. As she negotiates a spate of rumors at school, the film reveals a delicate sense of comedy, attuned to the acute embarrassments, social minefields, and roaring squalls of adolescence. It understands the passing fancies and worries of the teenager, whether it’s Alma’s pointless aggression with her single mother or her friend Saralou’s (Malin Bjørhovde) habit of writing chatty letters to death row prisoners in Texas. The movie knows that these things will pass, even if the kids do not.

See PopMatters‘ review.