From A Star is Born to Vox Lux to Inside Llewyn Davis, cinema abounds with stories of jaded musicians who either burned too bright or never quite reached the heights they hoped. In the new film Low Expectations, a bittersweet tale from Oslo that arrives very much in the slipstream of Joachim Trier, that reliable set-up is given what I can only describe as a Gen-Z twist. One of the buzzier titles to emerge from Directors’ Fortnight this year, it focuses on a uniquely 21st-century phenomenon: the artist who achieves mid-tier fame after appearing on all the right websites and blogs, even getting to tour the world, but finds themselves without a great deal to show for it once that early fizzle fades. Â
Low Expectations is the debut feature of Eivind Landsvik, a filmmaker who’s been releasing a steady stream of shorts since 2016. In spite of such output, the director has stated his film’s inspiration arrived during a low professional ebb—around the time he took a job as a proctor in Oslo during high school exam time—and it was during those long, uneventful hours that he put together the story of a singer named Maja who finds herself in that same occupation and is forced to deal with the burden of monotony (A Star is Bored?) after a decade of flying relatively high. For this lead part, the director has pulled a major coup by casting Marie Ulven (a real-life bedroom pop star who goes by the stage name Girl in Red) in the role. With her endearing performance, the lightly metatextual energy that the singer naturally brings, and an accomplished craft in images and sound, the film serves a disarming, very enjoyable watch.
Given Trier’s success in the last few years, I imagine it must be grating for any up-and-coming Norwegian filmmaker to be compared with him, but Landsvik’s choices for color, film stock, dry humor, and editing rhythms make Low Expectations one of the clearest examples I’ve yet seen of the Sentimental Value director’s influence. It obviously helps when Trier’s longest-serving collaborator, Anders Danielsen Lie, appears in a role, but the similarities would have been apparent regardless; depending on your tastes, this might be no bad thing. The same goes for the familiarity of story beats: you’ll probably be able to guess that Maja will struggle to escape her creative block and find a new source of confidence in the classroom, and that this renewed belief will help her artistic process. But tropes are tropes for a reason, and any opportunity to see them used so precisely and delicately should be welcomed.
Along with Ulven’s charming lead performance, Low Expectations boasts a number of nice supporting turns—notably Danielsen Lie (as an older teacher who becomes a low-key mentor), Embla Berntsen (as a student who Maja forms a bond with), Tone Mostraum (touching as the singer’s mom), and (best of all) Kind Monsson—an actor who starred in Landsvik’s short Tits and basically steals every scene he’s in here as Oscar, the school’s I.T. guy. “No, that’s not my thing,” he dryly explains when Maja, mid-cigarette break, jokingly asks if he’s planning to shoot up the school. “I’ve actually had sex.”
No wheels are reinvented, not everything’s a home run, but after two weeks of long and weighty films in Cannes, Low Expectations felt as familiar and comforting as a warm breeze.
Low Expectations premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival.