In Moonlight, The Moment comes fourteen minutes and twenty-five seconds into the film. In Carol, nine minutes and forty-five seconds. In Brokeback Mountain, a speedy three minutes. In Pariah, twenty-seven. “The Moment” to which I’m referring is the point of no return in films about queer sexual awakening; the eye-lock between two forbidden lovers. Everything that follows, including the collision of bodies that always speaks louder than a character’s verbal denial of attraction, is terrible and beautiful. If the viewer holds their breath long enough, they’ll be rewarded with a glimmer of hope at the end. It’s such a tender and predictable affair that we’d be better people if we could set our alarm clocks by the steady pulse of the “coming out” feature film. Small children on the street would coo at us. “You’re glowing,” our colleagues would observe. “It’s queer cinema,” we’d respond.
But because there is much — so much! — to live for after this inaugural struggle with sexual identity, the existentialist coming-out flick has limitations. Ironically, queer advancement has threatened the subgenre’s ability to pack a punch. Despite other serious challenges, we are coming out younger, and to fewer histrionic responses from loved ones — that’s if, of course, we’re buying into their insufficient notions of gender and sexuality in the first place.
Joachim Trier’s Thelma, Norway’s contender for Best Foreign Language Film at the 2018 Oscars, rescues the coming-out tale from its endangered status by plopping it into a horror movie. The genre, with its waxing and waning tension, nicely captures the real-life chills and thrills of first homoerotic desire. Like most coming-out features, Trier’s fourth film capitalizes on the anxieties emerging queer people have historically encountered. Religious incompatibility, familial disapproval, unreciprocated attraction, and humiliation in front of one’s straight peers all cause the freshman college student stress that she’s ill-equipped to manage. Her responses to these quiet pressures are exaggerated, but not in the direction of melodrama.
Our Thelma doesn’t, for example, leap across a dinner table like Ellen Muth’s character in the Lifetime Original The Truth About Jane; she doesn’t force-feed a knuckle sandwich to the person who has called her a “dyke” mid-meal. In Thelma’s modern world, the bullies prefer subtle, condescending remarks to homophobic monologues. Instead of theatrics, she veers toward the grotesque. With her same-sex attraction backed into a corner, Thelma’s body must find another outlet. She trembles, her body releasing a pent-up electrical charge. The world around her reacts: windows shatter, water turns to ice, and people vanish. Her future — and the healthy queer relationships that could come with it — are compromised. If you’re looking for an intense, lesbian-oriented film that explores religious oppression to tide you over until Disobedience is released, Thelma delivers everything but the saliva.
The movie opens with a bird’s-eye view of rural Norway’s snowy woodlands. A man, wielding a hunting rifle, crunches his way across a frozen lake with his young daughter, Thelma, who observes fish swimming below the ice. Spotting a deer, he cocks his gun and aims. But before shooting the buck, he weighs the merits of shooting the kid instead. Before we have answers, it’s a dozen years later.
Finally far enough away from her overprotective and devout Christian parents to be her own person, Thelma (Eili Harboe) realizes her attraction to women. She too, like Little and Kevin or Carol and Therese, experiences The Moment. But instead of a field or a department store, hers occurs in a study hall. Thelma’s hot, seemingly straight peer Anja (Kaya Wilkins) smiles warmly and takes a seat beside her. Suddenly, the room begins to tremble. A murder of crows brutally collides with the building’s windowpanes. Overwhelmed by energy of the connection, she seizes up and crumples to the floor.
Thelma doesn’t know it yet, but she’s struggling with psychogenic non-epileptic seizures and a rough case of telekinesis. In horror, the latter is a classic symptom of suppression (just ask Thelma’s distant Yankee cousin, Brian De Palma’s Carrie White). When author Rita Mae Brown observed, “A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion” in 1970, she must’ve been premonitioning Trier’s title character.
As feelings between the two girls intensify, so do Thelma’s convulsions. The fibs she tells her helicopter parents in order to live also aggravate her condition. In one of the film’s most exhilarating sequences, Thelma accompanies newly-single Anja to the Norway National Ballet. Tentatively, they hold hands as they enjoy the performance. Thelma, sensing a looming convulsion, does her damndest to stifle it, but her nervous energy takes up residence in a huge acoustic ornament that’s suspended from the ceiling. We see the pupae-shaped sculpture sway and creak in wide shot, threatening to crush the audience. Not wanting to cause anyone harm, Thelma flees. When Anja catches up to Thelma and kisses her ardently, Thelma reciprocates. Realizing that life has more to offer than bedtime prayers, she has no choice: she must stop running and find out what’s wrong with her before it’s too late.
Thelma’s white-knuckled search for answers — which is full of mind-bending CGI sequences, biology lectures, unnerving medical procedures, young-adult awkwardness, and love scenes that cheekily feature the serpent from the Garden of Eden — finally catches up to this pivotal moment from her childhood. The horror tropes are everywhere in this one. Like Carrie, Thelma’s parents have used religion and isolation to keep her disturbing condition at bay rather than accepting it. As a consequence of their deliberate incompetence, our heroine has to shirk stigma, learn to keep her electrical discharges to herself, ace her classes, and figure out how to have sex with a girl — all in her first semester of undergrad.
Along with Carrie, Thelma’s journey to discover and wield her powers reminds me of another paranormal character: Maureen, Kristen Stewart’s psychic protag in Olivier Assayas’ horror-thriller Personal Shopper (2016). Both millennial women, a little too gaunt and withdrawn, prefer to consult technology over a physician, their Wikipedia and YouTube searches dramatized as they ponder genetics’ role in their burdensome gifts. Maureen’s life didn’t take a turn for the clairvoyant until the sudden death of her twin brother, Lewis; over time, Thelma discovers that her paternal grandmother was institutionalized for an “illness” like her own. While Thelma’s lust for Anja is obviously her trigger, Maureen’s queerness is more understated: Stewart’s trademark slouch notwithstanding, her character’s apathy towards a faraway boyfriend, a naughty tendency for playing dress-up in her boss’ off-limits Chanel, and an ear for Marlene Dietrich cabaret songs suggest that lesbianism is as much of a ghostly nuisance for Maureen as her dead brother is.
In addition to blood ties, Maureen and Thelma also fawn over the celebrated women who shared their conditions: the Swedish artist and mystic Hilma af Klint and the French warrior Joan of Arc, respectively. These discoveries echo the priceless moments when a queer person encounters a historical figure of similar inclination — be it Baldwin, Jorgensen, Vargas, or Woolf — for the first time. As Janet Mock recently said of Reina Gossett’s groundbreaking research on late 20th century transwomen of color, “I met superheroines, real-life ones [...] it introduced me — and my generation who didn’t live through the Stonewall Riots, the formation of the LGBTQ movement and the AIDS crisis — to our radical, resistant roots.” Sweeping statements about the entire queer community should always be avoided, but if one can be made responsibly, it is that each of us possesses some variation of this unrelenting curiosity.
By reclaiming and toying with the idea of queerness as a medical disorder, Thelma stimulates that very part of the queer imagination. While the mix of religious and scientific jargon used to get that point across is sometimes hit-and-miss, the history is too real. Modern medicine wasn’t fully convinced that we weren’t afflicted with a disorder until the World Health Organization dropped homosexuality from its ICD classification in 1992. Horror allows Thelma to work with the history queer people have been dealt; the genre never requests an apology for yesterday’s transgressions, but it might seek reparations by giving the viewer a few spooks. It is in this grey area between pleasure and disorder that we’ll find the next bounty of transgressive stories worth, reclaiming, writing, and filming. It’s weirdly empowering to inhabit a body that was once aggressively pathologized and to consider what that means for the future of queer narrative, including the coming-out tale.
Sarah Fonseca is an essayist and film writer from the Georgia foothills who lives in New York City. Her writing has appeared in Bitch Flicks, cléo: a journal of film and feminism, IndieWire, Posture Magazine, and Slate. She enjoys a balanced breakfast of femme-led dramas, experimental queer cinemas, and blockbuster action flicks.