Abject Ecologies: Patriarchal Containment and Feminist Embodiment in Thelma

Norwegian auteur Joachim Trier’s fourth feature film, Thelma (2017), opens with a flashback. A young girl and her father walk across a frozen lake. The camera captures them in an extreme long shot as they make their way across the wintry landscape, emphasizing the deep space of the scene as the ice recedes into the background. A forest in the distance forms an undulating horizon, hiding the late-afternoon winter sun that has just gone down. The surface of the lake is as smooth as a mirror, giving us a reflection of the two figures as they slowly trudge across it.