So much cinematic effort is constantly expended plumbing the depths—okay, the shallows—of male teenage fantasies that young female desires tend to get short shrift onscreen. The ladies deserve equal time, and they finally get some [Ahem] in this charmingly blunt Norwegian teen sex comedy. Alma (Bergsholm), 15 years old and ragingly horny, spends most of her free time talking with phone sex operators and pining for her cute neighbor, Artur (Myren). After the boy next door hits on Alma at a party—poking someone in the leg with your penis counts as flirting, right?—and she blabs about it later that night, our hormonal heroine becomes a social pariah. She can only endure the taunts of her peers (who anoint her “Dick Alma”) and retreat further into her fantasies.
These daydreams, written and directed by Jannicke Systad Jacobsen from a popular Norwegian novel, ring with the sort of painfully awkward truths that are rare in teen comedies about social misfits of either gender. Bergsholm is an immediately likable, utterly natural and absolutely fearless star (see: the scene in which she masturbates on the kitchen floor just as her mother comes home), even if this brief coming-of-age tale sells her performance short by wrapping things up at hyperspeed in the film’s final act. Still, there’s plenty here to recommend; so what if its explicitness and femcentric sexuality turn off some prudish viewers, dammit!—Matt Singer