Nina Knag’s road to hell on a fine, strapping pavement of good intentions: Se meg
P. Stuart Robinson (b. 1958), is an Associate Professor in Political Science at the University of Tromsø. He writes academically about the politics of film, and has published in such scholarly journals as Alphaville, Apparatus and Nordlit.
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KVIFF 2025: Norwegians! They try to be nice but really they’re dark to the core – just how the Czechs like them!
Norwegians do best when they take the gloves right off – cold as it may be! The latest proof is Nina Knag’s ‘road to hell’ on a fine, strapping pavement of good intentions, Se meg (Don’t Call Me Mama), which premiered in Karlovy Vary earlier this summer. She brings us the leftfield, vaguely dangerous Norwegians we crave, and who the Czechs have known and loved since Bård Breien’s The Art of Negative Thinking took this festival by storm back in 2007.
I interviewed Nina Knag at KVIFF this month, and she was so nice that I began to wonder if she realises just how dark Se meg (2025) is, how bold a movie she has made. For Knag takes her protagonist, Eva, played brilliantly by Pia Tjelta, to a very dark place.
The theme is the abuse of power. Eva the schoolteacher clearly cares about young people in a good way – the right way. This is motivation enough for her to volunteer at the refugee centre, and what could be more natural than to mentor Amir, as a young man showing clear writing talent? As the mayor’s wife she has other issues to contend with, however. Beneath the public veneer this high-powered couple are clearly in trouble, and her husband’s infidelity is the impetus to her ‘mentorship’ taking a dangerous turn – above all for Amir (Tarek Zayat) himself, as the vulnerable, marginalised outsider.
[Plot spoilers below.]
At her definitively lowest moment, she attempts to blow a reluctant – even slightly disgusted – teenager, and it finally strikes home what kind of line she has crossed. The scene blows (pardon the expression) her trite, self-serving illusions away. This isn’t mutual love; this is one-sided lust – and exploitation – enabled and veiled by power. As she recoils from her own ‘handiwork,’ the look on her face is hard to describe yet unforgettable. It’s as though her life is passing before her eyes, as though she’s asking herself, ‘Is this what I have become?’
The film’s denouement is all the more telling because we have witnessed Eva at her best, with her school pupils, seeing them, spotting their potential and helping them tap it, to be the best they can. The irony is her own plight. Who sees her? Not her husband anymore, and he’s already started looking elsewhere. Not only looking!
Eva clearly has the capacity to care, to see the needs of others and even meet them, but she also has her own needs, whose neglect has left an aching hole in her life. She carries them like a ticking timebomb. In this taught, compelling study, we see her neediness grow like a murderous tumour. Indeed, we see it unleash, among other things, a voracious sexual appetite, the raw expression and catharsis of her desperate need to be loved.
Eva brings the same care and attention to volunteering at the refugee centre that we first observed at school. She brings it, not least, to the case of the handsome young Syrian refugee, Amir. He clearly has talent as a writer, undimmed by its application to his adopted language. She takes him under her wing. It seems perfectly natural – at first – but all the pedagogy and nurturing goodwill soon betray a sort of urgent fixation.
It begins with the desperate measure taken to ‘save him’ from being rehoused in another community. She installs him in the family home, against the protests – initially – of her husband, the mayor. Ever the political opportunist, he soon warms to the idea, however. Then, when Eva discovers Amir’s secret, that he absconded to Norway with a fake identity after being denied Danish asylum, she helps him hide it – at first. In this way, she draws him ever deeper into her domain – and confidence. Then her efforts to comfort him in his hour of need – and fear – turn into something else…
The spiral down to the very depths: There are many in cinema, but they are not easily made convincing – let alone enticing, that is, enticing enough to take us along for the ride, to that place of calumny and depravity we, as nice people, would really prefer to avoid – or so we tell ourselves. A cinematic spiral depends, above all, on a standout acting performance.
A couple come to mind: Nicolas Cage as Ben Sanderson, drinking himself to death in Mike Figgis’s Leaving Las Vegas (1995); William H. Macy as Jerry Lundegaard, digging himself and his loved ones into a hole with the help of a few unscrupulous and professionally incompetent hoodlums, in Joel and Ethan Coen’s Fargo (1996).
I have no qualms about placing Tjelta up there among the likes of Cage and Macy. Her performance turned fiction real, and cinematic horror into our collective worst nightmares. I wasn’t in the least surprised when she won the best actress award.
Let’s detour to Fargo for a moment, because there are interesting parallels in plot construction and the call to acting excellence. In an absolute masterclass performance, Macy shows us a sorry, beaten little man, digging himself ever deeper in the mire of debt and criminal jeopardy by the very desperation of his efforts to wriggle free. The more he struggles the more horror he unleashes, like the proverbial mouse in a trap, as he trades in his petty misfortunes for an unwonted yet predictable trail of murderous carnage.
The key to the character’s fascination lies in his combined victimhood and venality. It’s the same combination that enlivens Se meg. What draws us to the proverbial anti-hero is the dangerous pathos of the cornered animal. We can imagine ourselves in our darkest moments considering dubious methods of survival, driven in our desperation to do ‘questionable things.’ Eva may live in a big house with a celebrity husband, but her life has been emptied of joy and love. Like Jerry, she makes a sort of pact with the devil; like Ben, she is, metaphorically speaking, leaving Las Vegas.
Knag has clearly grasped the essence of what is, in a way, everyone’s own worst nightmare, the potential for evil in all of us as complex, vulnerable human beings. As she puts it, ‘We all have this violence inside of us if something threatens us. It’s a film about how far you are willing to go if your life depends on it,’ or in the sometimes desperate ‘need to connect.’ When push comes to shove, ‘all human beings lie, sometimes to survive but sometimes to stay in control.’ Tjelta, as Eva, lies exquisitely, milking the irony of her earlier indignant judgment of her husband’s dishonesty.
Seg meg carries us along on a veritable rollercoaster ride, except one that is somehow always heading further down. Maybe it’s a helter-skelter? Either way, this is top-drawer entertainment and impeccable film craft – and yet I couldn’t help wanting more, to be specific, more of the psychological drama, which provides the narrative’s understated yet vital driving force.
In Karlovy Vary, Knag talked to me about the long road from conception to production. The idea stimulated great interest from producers and financers – eventually – but, perhaps inevitability, they preferred to rein in its potential scope, keep things lean and hungry.
It’s a hard road to a first feature anywhere but perhaps nowhere more than Norway, where a sort of apprenticeship model seems to hold sway. This ensures solid craft but sometimes at the expense of inspiration and especially youthful audacity. The genius of The Art of Negative Thinking is the filmmaker’s gloves came right off, as much as those of his combative protagonists. He turned the film’s knobs (Spinal-Tap style) up to 11.
In Se meg we get a glimpse of a bleak psychological landscape as it races by, thriller-style, to a sort of hell. The hell that interests me most, however, hinted at tantalisingly, is the inner one. This is the unravelling of self and belonging, the dark ambivalence – and human frailty – at the heart of the effort to love and to do good, and the wellsprings of its contingent, and far from inevitable, corruption.
Knag clearly understands ‘this ambivalence’ very well, As she puts it, ‘It’s a fragile line between empathy and judgement, and desire and destruction.’ It is here, too, that we get deeper into the political psychology at work, in need of exposure and critique: ‘from a Norwegian perspective, we’re privileged, we’re a rich country, we want to help but not if it costs us too much. That’s an uncomfortable truth that most of us need to see.’
At the same time, it’s the perennial problem of film: how deep are you prepared to go and at what cost? As a regular festivalgoer I’ve seen plenty of arthouse-style films, and it really is a style, with its own conventions we might uncharitably describe as the quintessence of cinematic pretension: long shots; lingering close-ups; static, aesthetically constituted frames; minimalist dialogue.
Good filmmaking is always a balancing act. As Knag herself puts it, ‘I don’t want to make film just for myself and my film friends. I want to make films that the ordinary person wants to see. You can’t be that privileged to just make films for the elite… and I wanted it to be an intense drama, an intense journey.’ She succeeded in spades. Moreover, she gave us a tantalising glimpse of the psychological wasteland below.
Is it wrong of me to crave more? I suspect, at any rate, that Knag has it within her to take us a little further on this psychological journey, to what Joseph Conrad famously called ‘the heart of an immense darkness’ – perhaps with her next film? Now, I hope the gloves can come off and stay off, because the Czechs, for a start, are going to love it!
I look forward with some confidence knowing that, for so many filmmakers (as well as bands, novelists, etc.), their first work is bound to be good, but the second is more likely to be great. So, keep up the good work, and keep it dark. It really is the Norwegian way!