Despite her relative youth, 29-year-old Maja (Marie Ulven) has lived a lot of life. After high school she pursued a music career; for a while she was successful, racking up a fanbase and touring the world, but after frittering away her record deal advance on parties and shopping, she’s gone to ground in her childhood home, hiding bagged wine in her wardrobe and avoiding anyone from her old life. Her patient but frustrated mother Astrid (Tone Mostrum) gets Maja a temporary job working as an exam invigilator at a local school, where she bonds with the teenage Aida (Embla Berntsen Stridbeck) who’s a fan of her music, while her sweet older co-worker Johannes (Anders Danielsen Lie) attempts to provide Maja with the wisdom of experience.
Eivind Landsvik’s feature debut hugely benefits from its star; Ulven, better known as Girl in Red, came to fame as a musician in 2019. She soon found herself touring with the likes of Conan Gray and Taylor Swift, before detailing her struggles with OCD and anxiety in 2022, so she knows a little something about the pressures of pop stardom. While it’s impossible to say how much of Ulven is in Maja, she certainly nails the loneliness and insecurity that plagues many young people (famous or not) as they try to figure out who they are. Her delicate performance tempers the slightly more cliché aspects of Landsvik’s script which come into the film’s final act, resolving Maja’s anxieties a little more neatly than feels believable. It’s a shame there isn’t more of a showcase for Ulven’s musical talent, given that a reluctance to make music and perform plagues Maja.
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There’s plenty about Low Expectations that impresses though; an opening exchange between Johannes and co-worker Knut (Snorre Kind Monsson) about Michael Mann’s Heat is particularly fun, while the awkward run-in Maja has with a musician she used to know is excruciating in its accuracy. He brags about how he’s going to be signed to Warp records any day now while Maja looks completely disinterested, all the while wondering if her music career is over before it even really started. Andreas Bjorseth’s gorgeous 16mm cinematography grants the film a certain wistfulness, as flashbacks reveal glimpses into Maja’s lonely childhood and the time she witnessed a drowning at her local swimming pool that had a profound impact on her. While it’s likely that comparisons will be made between Landsvik’s film and his countryman Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World (a previous Cannes premier about a young Norwegian woman, co-starring Anders Danielsen Lie) there’s a roughness about Low Expectations that sets it apart, with a protagonist who feels messy in a less glamorous way than Renate Reinsve’s Julie.
