Butterfly

Bluesky

In Butterfly, Norwegian director Itonje Søimer Guttormsen stages grief as a messy homecoming and then keeps yanking the ground out from under it. After their mother Vera (Lillian Müller) dies suddenly in the mountains of Gran Canaria, estranged half-sisters Diana (Helene Bjørneby) and Lily (Renate Reinsve) return to sort out what she left behind. Not just property and paperwork, but a past they have both tried to seal off. Diana has built a quiet, dutiful life back in Norway; Lily has made herself into a Hamburg nightlife creature, a persona worn like armour in Hamburg’s art scene. Renate Reinsve plays Lily with an appealing unsentimental chilliness, all defensive poise and performative detachment.

The set-up hints at something sharp: tourists who step outside the all-inclusive bubble and stumble into an island that remembers colonisation, extraction, and the kind of “spiritual” tourism that treats other people’s histories as props. Vera’s legacy, a mortgaged, defunct astronomical observatory turned into some vaguely defined alternative retreat, could have been a precise satirical target. Is it a collective, a rehab, a self-help temple, a scam with incense? The characters toss labels around, but nothing ever lands with enough specificity to bite. Ambiguity can be a strategy, but here it often reads like evasiveness.

Guttormsen leans hard into absurdism and hybrid textures. The story toggles between polished footage and Lily’s camcorder gaze, with shifting aspect ratios that keep announcing themselves. Instead of enriching perspective, the device becomes a tic, a formal reminder that you are watching a construction rather than being pulled into a contradiction. The result is a stop-start rhythm. Scenes build toward tension, then dissolve into quirky detours and performative strangeness. You can feel the director aiming for a destabiliaed, porous reality. You can also feel how often that intention turns into clutter.

And yet, Reinsve is rarely dull. Lily’s costuming and physical choices are wonderfully pointed, as if she is daring everyone to misread her, including her sister. Her prickliness becomes the clearest line in the work; a woman who has survived by turning herself into an aesthetic object, now forced to face her mother’s legacy, shaped by the same impulse in a different register. Helene Bjørneby’s Diana provides the necessary counterweight, all contained resentment and exhausted responsibility, even when the script gives her little room to deepen beyond reaction.

The problem is that Butterfly cannot decide what it wants its chaos to reveal. The island’s “hidden heart” remains more brochure than wound, and the critique of faux indigeneity and Norwegians abroad stays at the level of suggestion. At 117 minutes, the feature keeps circling its targets without committing to a clean strike.

Source