The parent-teacher meeting you never wanted to attend

In Tutoring, a young and emotional teacher must lead a meeting between the mothers of two children involved in an incident, related by tense family ties and representing two very different profiles of femininity, and the father of one of them. The images that accompany the opening credits of the film are footage of everyday scenes from a nursery school that, without falling into the gloom of horror films, evoke a certain uneasiness, a climate of suspicion. And this raises a question: will the story take the form of a drama or a thriller?

Marked by an abundance of long, awkward scenes that test the audience, thefirst work by director Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel has something of thriller A judicial drama (with judges without robes) that warns about adults who settle conflicts through their children. Along the way, Ullmann shows a certain visual inventiveness and incorporates some hallucinatory moments, representative of the inner world of a character, that can cause strangeness. In the final stretch, the elements of intrigue (rationing information, unearthing secrets in a surprising way) end up displacing the tense drama sprinkled with black humor (remember A wild god?). The work is, in some ways, indeterminate, uncertain, and this may seem narratively unrigorous (and somewhat frivolous), but it can also be refreshing. In some ways, this indeterminacy fits with the difficulty of establishing a truth from dissenting witnesses.

[You can check the screenings in their original version with Catalan subtitles at this link]