Critics reviews

Trier, accompanied once again by co-screenwriter Eskil Vogt, has crafted a methodically paced examination of sorrow and memory whose incendiary material is all the more affecting for its composure, disquieting calm and normality, rooted as it is in their everyday lives.

Trier slips unobtrusively into an American milieu, but then again, the terrain of Louder than Bombs is largely mental, and frequently hormonal or otherwise restless, and thus a perfect match for this eager, prolific filmmaker. Trier's cinema is ionized.

Told with Trier's keen emotional sensitivity and affinity for playful narrative structure, Louder Than Bombs explores the subjective experience of memory and how we allow it to affect our lives.

Joachim Trier’s “Louder Than Bombs” is interested in the intersection between grief and memory, and how difficult it is to capture both either through photography or film.

As I've just laid it out, that sounds like a movie neither you nor I would probably want to see. But then, movies are often about so much more than what they're about, and the riches of Louder Than Bombs lie in the way Trier reveals the secret fears and longings of nearly every character, showing, ultimately, that even when people fail to connect, that itself can be a kind of connection.

With its unforced incidents and subtle performances, Trier’s film makes potently clear that emotional truth is a matter of perspective. It’s in the way a photographer crops an image. It’s in the stories, whether about loved ones or war zones, that we need to believe or choose to ignore.

In his mournful, probing drama Louder Than Bombs, he [Trier] uses flurries of images (along with first-person narration) to capture peoples’ teeming inner spaces.

The tale isn't new, nor are the characters, but director Joachim Trier's stylistic and narrative dexterity demands attention: He possesses that rare ability to deconstruct his material without denying us the simple beauties of a well-told story.

What makes the film more interesting than the usual and formulaically structured hyperlink drama is its commitment to mounting inquiries rather than offering pat solutions. Refusing to approach this tangle of misery as a puzzle to be solved, the film keeps searching further, digging up further complications and issues, opening up the story instead of closing it off.

The use of the name Conrad suggests a possible homage to Robert Redford's Ordinary People (1980), but the final product lands somewhere between that decorous, undeniably moving family drama and Jason Reitman's startlingly misjudged entry in the way-we-live-now sweepstakes, Men, Women & Children (2014).

Like the drug addict in Trier's 2011 Oslo, August 31st, the war photographer in Louder Than Bombs wrestles to reconcile her private and public selves. Trier only gives us glimpses of her quotidian hell but Huppert's quietly suffering face says it all, perpetuating the terrors of war in the offscreen space. There is beauty to be found in this solemn tribute, but such dignified souls deserve deeper exploration.

It can't seem to choose whether or not it wants to commit to being the straightforward kind of drama it is, or something more abstract, digressive, and fragmented, telling a story through an accumulation of small moments. The film's structure seems to suggest it would rather be the latter, but its tonal and structural shifts simply muddle the film instead of making it consistently, believably sad.