If co-writer/director Joachim Trier had wrestled as much narrative discipline as visual style into this movie, it might have been one of the most potent allegories ever about the consequences of repression. It’s the story of Thelma (Eili Harboe), a young woman whose freshman year of college in Oslo marks her first time away from her strictly Christian parents. But this time of discovery finds her learning not just that she might be attracted to a woman (Kaya Wilkins), but that she might have unimaginable abilities within her. Trier builds the ominous tension right from the unsettling opening sequence, and keeps offering arresting images throughout as Thelma’s fantasies and eruptions of power result in bizarre circumstances. There’s also a fairly obvious swipe at pious efforts to squelch same-sex desires, but the allegory gets muddled by making Thelma’s supernatural “gifts” so dangerous that attempting to control them doesn’t seem like such an unreasonable idea. Harboe’s beautifully anxious performance allows her to be a steady center of an insinuating piece of cinema, even if the center of the story doesn’t always hold. By Scott Renshaw