Long before Joachim Trier made the Oscar-winning The Worst Person in the World and this year’s festival megahit Sentimental Value, there was 2015’s Louder than Bombs: a far stranger, slipperier film worth watching for Isabelle Huppert’s spectral turn alone. She plays a character also called Isabelle, a renowned war photographer whose secrets haunt her family three years after her sudden death.
Her teenage son Conrad (Devin Druid) still daydreams in class about the car crash that claimed her life, imagining her final, panicked moments. His brother Jonah (Jesse Eisenberg) and father Gene (Gabriel Byrne) know (and conceal) the truth: that her fateful, split-second swerve was an act of suicide.
The film’s cacophony of grief and anxious romance erupt within upstate New York, 6,000km away from the Nordic, millennial anomie of Joachim’s informal Oslo trilogy. It’s possibly the Danish-Norwegian director’s most turbulent film. It’s certainly his most divisive. I’d go as far to say that, 10 years on, his English-language debut has proven to be one of his most essential works, mapping out the jagged, emotional terrain he would later come to revisit.
Across a series of flashbacks (in which perspectives, memories and dreams are interlaced), the family’s matriarch is gradually revealed. She worries more about the ethical dimensions of her work than its active occupational hazards, questioning her responsibilities as both observer and purveyor of suffering. Not unlike the recovering addict protagonist of Oslo, August 31st, there’s a compulsive edge to her psychology that Trier carefully probes; while her husband willingly gives up an acting career to support their children, she’s unable to submit to suburban life, even after getting caught in the crossfire.
How do you return to a home that seems to flourish in your absence? Each of Huppert’s prolonged closeups are burdened by a staggering weight, a gaze that feels impossible to meet.
Jonah, now a sociology professor, also finds himself withdrawing from the demands of family life. An arresting opening image lingers on his newborn child tentatively grasping his finger, Eisenberg staring down blankly. (Despite having played countless fast-talking know-it-alls, his performance is appreciably layered here – even if his awful haircut is anything but.) A retrospective exhibition of Isabelle’s work gives him an excuse to leave his wife at home while he trawls through his mother’s archives, where he’ll discover a previously hidden secret at the edge of a recent photo. An old ex-girlfriend soon beckons.
Gene is the most functional member of the family – and even then, he can’t help but sneak around with Conrad’s English teacher (Amy Ryan) or discreetly stalk his son’s eccentric after-school movements to a local graveyard in a sequence inspired by Vertigo. Online, he resorts to creating an anonymised account on a video game to reach out to his increasingly taciturn son, who strikes him down on sight.
On the whole, cinema still feels as though it’s yet to catch up with terminally online gen Z men, despite their being one of the most endlessly analysed demographics of the decade. Trier nails it with Conrad (thanks in no small part to Druid’s seething intensity), a teen who instinctually abuses the hesitance of his permissive, liberal dad, and harbours sexual fantasies both banal and a little troubling. In an early scene, he suffocates himself with a plastic bag when asked to quit his gaming session. A later retaliation against a female teacher catalyses the film’s ugliest moment.
At the same time, he’s a genuinely perceptive creature. When he’s not gaming or compiling a LiveLeak-worthy playlist of decomposing bodies and surgery footage – “It has to be real,” he insists – he pours himself into a manifesto with a disarming, self-reflective honesty, his scattered thoughts encompassing personal masturbation data, dreams and the integrity of a photo composition. The punchline is that he intends on sending the soul-baring manuscript to his cheerleader crush (Ruby Jerins).
True to his natural, sometimes ill-advised sincerity, Conrad chastises his brother for deceiving his wife, declaring “If I had a girl, I’d never lie to her.” Jonah quickly brushes him off: “Yeah, good luck with that.” Where Trier’s adults are often burdened by shattered idealism, Conrad’s refusal to yield makes him one of the director’s most invigorating protagonists.
Louder than Bombs is available to rent in Australia, the UK and the US. For more recommendations of what to stream in Australia, click here
