Akalanka Niyangoda

Thelma (2017) Most movies are crafted to showcase the director’s vision, inviting the audience to sit back and admire the story from the outside. Thelma (2017), directed by Joachim Trier, turns this idea upside down. Here, we don’t simply watch events unfold — we experience them exactly as Thelma does. The so-called supernatural moments aren’t external forces, but reflections of how she perceives her world: her fears, her guilt, and her desires bleeding into reality. Through her eyes, snakes become symbols of suppressed sexuality, glass shattering represents broken promises, and Anja’s disappearance feels like a deliberate letting go — dramatized as if she vanished through fragile, breaking glass. Even her troubled memories of her brother are filtered through a lens of hate and guilt, shaping how we see them. This shift in perspective is what makes Thelma a unique psychological thriller. It’s not about whether the supernatural is real; it’s about how reality itself fractures when emotions are repressed too long. Instead of asking us to judge Thelma from the outside, the film immerses us inside her fragile, unstable reality. For anyone who loves thrillers that challenge the mind as much as they grip the senses, Thelma is a haunting and thought-provoking experience — a story that lingers because it asks us to see the world not as it is, but as Thelma sees it.