I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

I like films which are open-ended where there are unexplained events and the viewers are left to conclude who was right and who was wrong. I also love films where the protagonist is a bit confused, cannot take decisions easily, quiet, etc, cause I relate to those kind of characters the most. Thelma falls into both these categories and was a wonderful film to watch. I was earlier watching an Hungarian film called On Body and Soul, and while reading the reviews for that film in some website, I was recommended Thelma. I must say I'm glad I watched Thelma (thrice actually). Each time I saw this film, it threw different perspectives at me, and I connected with different people on each viewing. This film is definitely to be seen multiple times for a deeper understanding. I'm giving a 10 for the completely different experience and fascinating screenplay. This is my kinda film.

Good looking film, clearly made with good intentions, but ultimately seems to lack conviction or even direction. I recognised tiny bits of the film and realised I must have seen a trailer some time ago that included the amazing scene near the beginning set in the university library when birds hit the windows and a girl falls into a seeming epileptic fit. Great photography most of the time, a wonderful and very believable performance from Eili Harboe lead us into a fascinating mystery involving drink, drugs, seizures and the supernatural. I don't now if the director had a clear idea of how to finish this film but I certainly found the end section most unsatisfactory, which is a shame because not only is it hard to believe but undermines much of what has gone before.

I really like bed this movie. It's a slow burn and very subtle in its horrors. But there are images I can't shake a week after seeing it (snakes, babies under ice, hair caught in the middle of a pane of glass). I think a lot of people misunderstand this film. My take, for what's its worth is that this is an art house version of Carrie. Telekinetic powers are unleashed with the sexual awakening of the main character, Thelma (that's pretty obvious). These are initially confusing and terrifying for her and she's horrified that she could possibly have made her same sex love interest, Anna, disappear into the nether. She goes to a neurologist to try and figure out why she's having seizures resulting in horrifying consequences. She ultimately turns to her fundamental Christian parents in her despair who explain to her she's always had these powers and that she killed her baby brother when she became either sick of his crying or because of jealousy over her parent's attention to him. Here's the part I think people miss. She kills her father before he kills her (he draws up a syringe for the act but ultimately puts it aside) in a quesrionably purposeful way. She then brings Anna back and heads back to Oslo/college fully aware of and in control of her powers, only slowing to heal her mother in the process (the mother is a paraplegic probably because of a suicidal jump from a bridge, years earlier, that didn't kill her). Anja probably isn't in love with Thelma, she is just being controlled by her. The ending isn't as happy as most here seem to perceive it to be. We know this because Thelma dreams/wants Anja to kiss her neck and then, moments later, Anja shows up to do so in the exact way as Thelma had just fantasized it. Anja is being controlled by Thelma and has no free will as this point whether she realizes it or not. Thelma seems to know her powers and how to use them finally (she isn't evil, per se, however) and isn't afraid to use them.Watch out ladies, you're not going to know what hits you when Thelma takes a liking.

A sexually awakening meet-cute laced with a preternatural conceit from Norwegian filmmaker Joachim Trier, THELMA, his fourth feature, instantly emits an uncanny thrill through its preamble with a frozen river, a doe-eyed deer and a rifle surprisingly pointing at a young girl's head by her father. The girl is Thelma (Harboe), now an undergraduate in Oslo, but still in thrall to her parents' over-frequent telephone calls concerning her quotidian whereabouts, and her rigid Catholic upbringing doesn't quite chime in with her peers. Afflicted by epileptic fits, which mystically coincide with the presence of a fellow student Anja (Wilkins), to whom she feels attracted. Their inchoate romance hits an abrupt and unexplained abeyance when Thelma is under treatment of a triggered seizure for medical checkup. Guilt-driven by Anja's unaccountable vanishing, Thelma retreats to home and childhood tragedy resurfaces, and the film manages to find a way out for her with a confluence of sacrifice and miracle, garnished with a pinch of numinous enlightenment, which renders its empowering ending a puff of absurdity that might not be appreciated by everyone. Trier grandly sinks his teeth into fabricating an atmospheric eeriness that permeates throughout Thelma's rude-awakening, even in the prosaic campus environs: a luminous library assailed by an avian outsider, a natatorium where terror of seclusion and drowning taking a spectacular visual form with flying colors and Thelma's dormitory building, lit by nocturnal luster where eldritch menace seeps from within. Thelma's rite-of-passage, from religious and familial suppression to physical arousing, until a final mental liberation, is conveyed with eloquence (a cracking tantalizing sequence amalgamated with a bringing-down-the-roof trepidation during a modern dance performance) and innovation (metaphors and animal symbols are deployed in good senses, whether it is the deer in the opening, the slithering snake in the psychedelic mid-stream, or the black bird purged near the end), though one might grouse that the student's life is pedestrianly exemplified by a strobing nightstand, casual get-togethers deadened by alcohol and smoke. A convulsing (often in its literal sense) and pulsating Eili Harboe makes good in the center stage with both mettle and competence, but Kaya Wilkins's Anja is deficient in any thumbprint other than propelling the plot development in the mode of a hapless love interest, both Henrik Rafaelsen and Ellen Dorrit Petersen are swell as Thelma's conflicting parents, often muddling the water of the saint-or-sinner dichotomy. In the event, THELMA is Trier's stern-faced take on the thematic dissection of embracing one's true id and freeing oneself from any extraneous shackles, it is a bracingly crafted parable with one proviso, SPOILERS AHEAD!!!, that if one can live down with the key placement of a dead toddler in its moral conundrum that eventually peters out in its gnomic reconciliation.