Skya

Skya is the Norwegian word for the cloud, and Ana Lindqvist's fourth feature spends two hours refusing to make that a metaphor. The weather in this film is just weather: it moves in over Tønsberg, it sits on Holmestrand for a week, it clears over Larvik on the morning everything is due. The characters look up at it the way people actually do, which is to say mostly when it is about to make their day harder.

The ensemble

The film follows a firm that insists it is not only an accounting firm — and then spends its running time quietly proving the claim. A payroll deadline is a thriller beat. A marketing meeting is a comedy set piece. An HR conversation in a stairwell, played almost entirely in one take, is the best-acted five minutes in Norwegian cinema this year.

What Lindqvist understands, and what the film is finally about, is that the people who keep small organisations alive are almost never the people the organisation is named after. Nine characters, three offices, one autumn, and not a single scene in a boardroom.

Where it slips

Nine is too many. The daycare thread and the sports-club thread are so strong that the retail strand in Larvik feels like it is being kept alive out of structural obligation, and it resolves with a tidiness the rest of the film has earned the right to refuse.

Is it worth your evening?

Yes, and it is the one on this list to see with the people you work with. You will each recognise a different character, and you will argue about which of you is which on the way home.