Where would we be without Nordic melancholia? Alongside flat-pack furniture, woolly sweaters and cinnamon buns, inner unease has become one of the North’s most recognisable exports. For years, Joachim Trier and Dag Johan Haugerud have convinced us that existential crises taste best in pastel shades, served during fika – the Scandinavian coffee-break ritual – in a beautifully decorated flat. Now fellow Norwegian Eivind Landsvik joins other promoters of Nordic blues with Low Expectations, an intimate feature debut about what remains when life’s fireworks have long gone out – or never quite ignited.
Maja (Marie Ulven, the Norwegian singer-songwriter known as Girl in Red) has a decade of musical highs behind, but her star faded before it could fully blaze. After squandering the advance from her record deal she retreats to the family home, swapping the stage for the school corridors where she works as a substitute exam invigilator. She watches teenagers sit exams and counts the unbearably drawn-out minutes. Her former life returns in afterimages, or rather after-sounds: flashes of a career more vivid than the present only sharpen her numbness. Once, everything happened too fast; now the hardest thing is simply to endure stillness.
Landsvik does not romanticise burnout, and Maja’s return to equilibrium contains no spectacular breakthrough – nor is that what she needs. She requires time, a touch of kindness, and people to whom she does not have to prove anything. Ulven endows the protagonist with a disarming, almost defenseless demeanor, with her casting more than a mere nod to Girl in Red fans. The Norwegian artist – whose anthems about queer identity and bedroom pop became the signature sound of her generation – brings to the character of Maja an awareness that cannot be learned on set: the price of translating one’s sensitivity into a public image.
The director moves across ground already prepared by the poetics of Trier and Haugerud. Soft, flickering light, muted colours, striped and checked patterns, and fluid editing evoke a cinema in which identity crises unfold in beautifully furnished interiors. At times, Low Expectations feels like another item from the same Nordic catalogue, but it offers a refreshing alternative to the myth of male genius, whose suffering proves the greatness of his talent. Here, creation is not a curse but one route back to oneself.
Not every subplot finds a satisfying resolution, and the muted soundscape and vague sadness sometimes settle into familiar registers of arthouse filmmaking. Even so, Landsvik sensitively captures Gen Z’s emotional landscape, coming of age under constant expectations and pressure to develop. Instead of profound healing, he proposes a slow rehabilitation into everyday life, where letting go matters as much as creating.
Low Expectations is therapeutic cinema at its best, though it promises no instant cure. Perhaps its greatest tenderness lies in its refusal to hurry: not every story of self-acceptance has to end in a triumphant return to the stage. What if, just for a moment, we stopped expecting more of ourselves – and found our own lagom, the Swedish ideal of “just right,” in a world endlessly demanding more?
Director: Eivind Landsvik
Writer: Eivind Landsvik
Cast: Marie Ulven, Anders Danielsen Lie, Tone Mostraum, Embla Berntsen, Snorre Kind Monsson, Clara Dessau
Running Time: 105 minutes
Country: Norway, Denmark
Year: 2026
Rating: 3.5
One-liner: A burned-out pop star returns home after a breakdown and slowly rebuilds herself through ordinary life, kindness and the freedom to expect less.
Karolina Zdunek
©FIPRESCI 2026