In Louder Than Bombs, Isabelle Reed (Isabelle Huppert) was a world-renowned war photographer who risked her life in pursuit of an endless string of perfect shots. She didn’t always come out of the war zone unscathed, but she always came out. It’s ironic, then, that despite surviving countless dangers around the globe, she wound up the lone fatality of a single-vehicle car crash in a cozy New York suburb. Three years later, a retrospective of her work is being organized, and her widowed husband Gene (Gabriel Byrne) has been tapped to display his wife’s photographs; he enlists the help of his grown son Jonah (Jesse Eisenberg).

Complicating matters is a New York Times piece set to be written in advance of the showing by Isabelle’s former colleague, war reporter Richard Weissman (David Strathairn). The piece will reveal that Isabelle’s car accident was no accident at all, but rather a suicide, something Gene is fully aware of. Not only would Gene prefer to keep a more positive memory of his wife at the forefront of the celebration in her honor, he would rather his younger son, the teenaged Conrad (Devin Druid), not know the truth about his mother’s death.

Louder Than Bombs, the first English-speaking film from Norwegian director and co-writer Joachim Trier, sets itself up to be a significant melodrama. All of the pieces are there and ready to be played.

There is Gene, the widower and father of two who, thanks to the retrospective being organized in his wife’s memory, must do more than face life’s small daily reminders of a love lost—he must immerse himself in the life she lived. He must look at every photograph she took and know that he’s seeing her life, a life she spent far away from her family, through her eyes. This takes its toll on Gene, which in turn takes its toll on how he handles his relationship with Hannah (Amy Ryan), his coworker and lover.

Next is Jonah, who is a lot like the old man and not just because they’re both teachers. When Jonah is faced with an event of overwhelming emotional magnitude, he also makes poor choices. In this instance, his wife Amy (Megan Ketch) has just given birth to their first child, but when the frazzled new dad scours the hospital halls for a vending machine, he runs into an old girlfriend. Their hug lasts almost as long as the lies he tells.

Conrad, whose life is challenging enough as a teenager without a mother, has all but disconnected himself emotionally from his father, opting to live in a world of loud music and online gaming. He’s awkward and introverted and everything one would expect from a 14-year-old in his situation, but he’s also undaunted in his secret love for his classmate crush, the cheerleader Melanie (Ruby Jerins).

Even Richard, the war correspondent, brings more to the story than just the byline on the revelatory posthumous profile of the revered photographer, wife, and mother.

Again, all of the melodramatic pieces are there, but much to his credit, Trier never plays those pieces the way most would expect them to be played. Instead, the filmmaker lets his characters progress through subtle developments that require the viewer to stay keenly attuned to the little things they say and do, rather than waiting for the next bombastic outburst to occur. A lot of that character progression is negative, but it’s genuine, and it’s fueled by the fatal flaws the trio shares—a wicked combination of denial, deceit, and dreadful communication. Watching them fool themselves and others isn’t like watching people spiral out of control and perish in a fiery crash. It’s more like watching people slowly dissolve. Only Conrad, despite (or perhaps because of) his youth, offers a glimmer of hope with his unflappable crush on Melanie and his refusal to be anything but the person he is. Husbands, fathers, and sons make poor choices that carry with them the potential for irrevocable consequences, and yet just like in real life, they can’t stop making those choices; it’s in their nature.

And what about Isabelle? She appears in flashback and in dreams, but she is more mystery than matriarch. Yes, she was a loving mother and wife, as well as a successful war photographer, but beyond that (and beyond the suggestion of depression), little else is known about her. This is a terrific move by Trier, because it maintains a sense of wonder about who this woman was and why she meant what she meant to the men in her life. To explain more would have done a disservice to the character. In the role, Huppert is mesmerizing, and Trier knows how to capture the best of her, including a long, lingering, dialogue-free close-up of Huppert as she stares down the camera, leaving you wondering what she is thinking about and hoping you’ll have the chance to learn.

The rest of the cast is excellent, anchored by an amazing performance by relative newcomer Druid as Conrad Reed. Byrne and Eisenberg may have (combined) decades more experience than Druid, but they need him to be great more than he needs them to be great, and he delivers.

Louder Than Bombs is a wrenching tale about the criticality of communication and the collateral damage of deceit in the wake of significant loss. The film has barely a false note in it, hardly a moment when a character says or does something that demands to be challenged, and only the ending left me disappointed as ringing somewhat hollow. Still, despite the questionable destination of the tale, the journey is completely worth it.

There’s an inherent paradox when it comes to family: despite spending more time with your parents/siblings than anyone else, you’ll never get to truly know who these people are. Joachim Trier’s Louder than Bombs, his follow-up to the devastating masterpiece Oslo August 31, explores the collisions between the individual, subjective experiences of family members, along with the barriers of communication that can spring up between the people closest to you. The film starts approximately three years after the death of Isabelle Reed (Isabelle Huppert), a war photographer who took her own life by crashing her car. Isabelle’s husband Gene (Gabriel Byrne) and eldest son Jonah (Jesse Eisenberg) know the truth surrounding her death, but her 15-year-old son Conrad (Devin Druid) still thinks it was an accident. Now, with Isabelle’s former colleague (David Strathairn) planning to reveal the truth about her death in a piece he’s planning for the New York Times, Gene tries to tell the truth to Conrad while attempting to repair the relationship between his two sons.

Trier and co-writer Eskil Vogt continue to show off their strength as filmmakers when it comes to experimenting with form to accurately portrayal the thought process. The film frequently swaps perspectives between Gene, Jonah and Conrad, while also hopping back and forth through time to when Isabelle was alive. Through this, it’s apparent that each man has a different idea of who Isabelle was, and the way these differing interpretations intersect is when Louder than Bombs hits a level of specificity that creates some great drama. But when Trier decides to break away and show the stories of each individual—Gene’s secret relationship with one of Conrad’s teachers (Amy Ryan), Jonah’s fear of becoming a father, and Conrad’s crush on a cheerleader that’s out of his league—it falls into clichés that wind up making the film get lost within itself. It’s disappointing because, when Trier’s methods do work, he creates some heart-wrenching and sublime moments (an extreme close-up of a character staring the camera down will haunt viewers for days). If Trier had more moments like these, Louder than Bombs could have been the masterpiece it so obviously wants to be.

Oslo, August 31st is magnificent. A film that succeeds on many levels. It is brilliantly made by its director Joachim Trier and brilliantly acted by his actors. I honestly don’t know if I can even find anything wrong with the film. Everything from a technical standpoint seems perfect. To be honest though, it would be very hard for me to watch the film again. I don’t know if I could, even if I wanted to. I cannot remember the last time a movie hit me on such an emotional level. A couple of times I was reduced to tears, other times I was filled with rage. Even right now as I write this, emotions from the film swell within me. When the film ended all I could do was watch the words move up the screen. I couldn’t move.

Oslo‘s premise is simple. A young man who was a former drug addict is being released for a day from the treatment center he has been living at while trying to get clean. He is heading to Oslo for a job interview and to catch up with old friends. The film takes place all within 24 hours so there is no extra fat on the film’s bones. One of the first scenes with Anders, the film’s main character, involves him walking to a lake and filling his pockets with rocks. He then grabs a very big rock that he struggles to lift. He gets it into his arms and slowly walks into to lake hoping to kill himself. He disappears for nearly 30 seconds only to resurface gasping for air.

Anders heads back to the treatment center and gets ready to depart on his trip for Oslo. When he arrives in Oslo he immediately seeks out an old friend who partied with Anders almost daily. Drugs, alcohol, girls. His name is Thomas, he quit the scene years ago and now has a wife and two young kids. They spend a couple hours catching up. I found their conversation fascinating. They talk about all kinds of things ranging from things they did back in the day to kids, being a father, lack of sex between married couples etc. The conversation slowly reveals what Anders will be figuring out on his trip. Does he have a shot at starting over and if he did is it truly worth it. The film then slowly unspools into a painful journey of a man who finds out exactly how cruel life really can be.

The journey Anders makes throughout this film is very hard to watch. In one scene he goes to a job interview and the interviewer asks him why there is such a big gap in employment and Anders is forced, painfully, to admit that he was a drug addict. The look on his face when he says this is gut-wrenching. Anders storms out of the office embarrassed and ashamed, taking his resume and tossing it into the trash. In another scene Anders runs into a man at a bar who slept with his former girlfriend while they were together. Anders forgives him and the man tells him that he ruined many lives and has no right forgive others. The man has no idea what Anders is trying to achieve on this day. He leaves the bar in despair.

Throughout he’ll visit a house party where he runs into an old flame, dance with some friends at a rave and in the best scene of the film he rides on a bike with another girl while a friend and his girl ride a bike with a fire extinguisher. They roam the empty quiet streets of Oslo spraying the extinguisher at each other. It’s presented quietly and poetically. The scene in itself is a mini masterpiece.

Let’s talk about Anders for a second. Here is a performance worthy of magnificent praise. One of the hardest things to do as an actor is to craft a character that we don’t sympathize with, but one that empathize with. Let’s face it; Anders has done terrible things in his life. As a drug addict he has ruined people’s lives, including his own. Some of his friends that he wants to see want nothing to do with him. Anders is a man who we don’t feel completely sorry for, but one that we can root for as he tries to right some of his wrongs.

The actor playing Anders, Anders Danielsen Lie, is utterly devastating in the title role. A lot of what comes from Anders isn’t even said and yet all his emotions are perfectly portrayed through his body language. Even as I type this I think about Anders sitting in a diner alone as he listens to people rattle off petty things they hate about life and it makes my chest tighten. Anders doesn’t represent any actual person I know, but the performance is so real it feels like he is a friend.

Trier presents a lot of scenes with Anders with either very little sound or none at all. Some of these scenes have him walking the streets of beautiful Oslo, some have him lying in the park and others are him in a bar or a club. This quietness shows how alone he really is in this world. Anders can be around as many people as he wants but he’ll always be alone. Most cannot relate to him and others will judge him enough not to even try.

Much of the film is incredibly hard to watch. Anders is consistently reminded of the things he’s done with almost no hope for a better life. You might be asking why I would love a film that is so depressing. For me it’s not what the film ultimately says or does, but how it goes about it. Here is a film that has an uncompromising vision. Pulling no punches; Trier hides none of Ander’s emotions. On a technical level the film is incredibly well made. Oslo, August 31st might be cruel, painful and depressing at times but it’s easily the best film I’ve seen this year.