Movies: ‘Louder than Bombs’ quietly explodes

It takes only 10 minutes to lay out the premise of Louder Than Bombs.

On the eve of an exhibition celebrating the career of a deceased war photographer, a New York Times writer plans to publish an article that will reveal what many do not yet know about her death: that the car crash that killed her was a suicide. At the center of the story is the woman’s now-teenage son, who still accepts what he was led to believe at age 12, that her death was accidental.

Simple enough. But what sounds, on paper, like the setup for a teary melodrama that peels back the layers of a narrative onion to expose the psychological trauma of the war zone and its indirect ripple effects on those at home turns out to be, in the bracingly original treatment of Norwegian filmmaker Joachim Trier, something else entirely.

Along with his regular co-writer Eskil Vogt, Trier has crafted a profoundly beautiful and strange meditation on secrets, lies, dreams, memories and misunderstanding.

Preparation for the retrospective survey of the photojournalism of Isabelle Reed (Isabelle Huppert) has left her husband, schoolteacher Gene (Gabriel Byrne), struggling to get a handle on the mess of negatives and memory cards still uncatalogued, years after his wife’s death.

Assisting him in this task is his older son, Jonah (Jesse Eisenberg), who has left his wife and infant daughter to help his father sort through the images. But rather than dwell on what those pictures contain — evidence of a secret, as it turns out — the film is more concerned with exploring the relationship between these two men and Conrad (Devin Druid), the troubled younger son and brother who is navigating the minefield of adolescence.

But the theme of growing up is only a small, oblique part of Bombs. Rather, the film looks at the nature of the interpretation of reality itself, via a prismatic method of storytelling that incorporates dreams, mistakes of perception and the unreliable narrator.

At several points, various characters speak, in voice-over, as if they were reciting their — or someone else’s — highly subjective version of events, which may or may not align precisely with what we see (or what others have told us).

One key element of the plot revolves around a document created by Conrad — part comic confession, part heartbreaking prose-poem — that he shares, against Jonah’s advice, with a pretty classmate he has a crush on (Ruby Jerins).

Conrad’s ultimate encounter with this girl is like nothing you are likely to have seen in any recent Hollywood movie about adolescents, yet it feels utterly, poignantly authentic.

As Louder than Bombs inches slowly toward its quiet yet resounding conclusion, it raises intriguing questions about that thing that journalists care so deeply about, but that artists know to be a slippery thing: truth.

One short sequence about photo cropping reminds us just how slippery. At various other points, characters allow others to jump to the wrong conclusion about things they have said or done. These misdirections aren’t so much malicious as they are examples of benign neglect.

Yet each of us, the film suggests, is adept at active deception: Conrad is obsessed with the role-playing video game Skyrim; Jonah hasn’t been faithful in his marriage; even their father is a former actor and is hiding an affair with Conrad’s teacher (Amy Ryan).

Rather than disorient us, these shifting lenses through which we view the story all focus on one essential fact: When you can’t trust your own eyes or what people tell you, the only certainty left is that we’re all lost together, adrift in the same rudderless boat.

Exclusive: Angelika Dallas; Angelika Plano

This story was originally published May 1, 2016 at 8:05 AM with the headline "Movies: ‘Louder than Bombs’ quietly explodes."