Young Critics Lab

22 décembre 2025

Janicke Askevold’s Solomamma: Modern Parenthood on Screen

By Noah Zoratti

Following her success at the Les Arcs Industry Village in 2024, where she won the 22D Music Award, and the premiere of her film in the International Competition at the Locarno Film Festival, director and actress Janicke Askevold returns to Les Arcs with Solomamma, shown in the Feature Film Competition section.

This witty and insightful film explores the complexities of modern life, seen through the lens of contemporary parenthood and the ever-evolving family structure. At its center is Edith, a single mother by choice who’s raising her four-year-old in Norway, a country where sperm donation is legal yet only partially absorbed into social consciousness. 

Edith’s life appears stable and structured: when she is not working as a journalist for a popular magazine, she writes children’s books designed to normalize the parenting model she embodies. It’s a hobby she mostly pursues for herself, as motherhood reveals itself to be a space of constant pressure. As a single mother, Edith feels implicitly obliged to prove her self-sufficiency, which gradually becomes its own burden. This equilibrium fractures when the identity of the donor is revealed. While the child remains the center of Edith’s world, the idea of his origins unsettles what had seemed unquestionable. 

Askevold follows a distinctly Nordic tradition of hyper-contemporary storytelling, addressing themes that not only find little space in Southern European narratives but also testify to a level of social progress advanced enough to generate new models of gender and family. In these contexts, where external pressures only partly govern personal choices, it is inner turmoil that takes center stage for the protagonists. This approach is reminiscent of recent works such as Dag Johan Haugerud’s trilogy Love, Sex, Dreams, as well as Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value and The Worst Person in the World. They depict young adults navigating identity and emotional crises through intimate and extended conversations, capturing the complexities of contemporary relationships and societal expectations. 

Solomamma features the same dialogue-heavy scenes and unresolved conversations, with alert and introspective characters weighed down by doubt. However, it sustains momentum through sharp narrative beats, humor and a persistent sense of unease. Lisa Loven Kongsli, previously acclaimed for her performance in Force Majeure, anchors the film with a nuanced and calibrated performance, delivering a character who’s at once visibly restrained and increasingly obsessive. Opposite to her, Herbert Nordrums – best known for his role in Trier’s The Worst Person in the World – embodies Niels, a naïve game developer with a boy-next-door quality. Edith attempts to project a trace of genetic failure onto him, displacing elsewhere a fear that might otherwise turn inward. 

Cinematographer Torjus Thesen translates Edith’s internal turmoil through erratic camerawork, zooming and panning to isolate different details and expressions. This approach gives visual form to what the character is forced to conceal. It imbues even the film’s quieter, more static scenes with a certain vitality, though at times it risks drawing attention to its own mechanics, becoming more distracting than revelatory. 

Over the course of its ninety-minute runtime, Solomamma remains engaging and continually reinvents itself, punctuated by frequent coincidences of uneven credibility which, at times, border on the overly contrived. Askevold favors these sudden narrative turns over prolonged introspection in order to move the story forward, at the cost of leaving certain emotional territories deliberately unexplored. 

The result is a story that prioritizes momentum over allowing the characters to develop gradually. Edith and Niels are not given an opportunity to undergo a definitive transformation; they stumble through expectations and responsibilities, settling into a provisional balance that feels authentic but fails to dismantle the very chains that held them back in the first place.

Nevertheless, the film offers a sincere portrayal of modern adulthood amid the pressures of rapid societal change. Rather than depicting parenthood as a fixed role, the film shows it as an ongoing process of self-discovery and negotiation. Without passing judgment, Askevold doesn’t shy away from deeply moral dilemmas, portraying people navigating through their own vulnerabilities, guilt and desires. 

Measured, intelligent and at times funny, Solomamma may leave some psychological terrain only partially explored, but it stands as a bittersweet study of parenthood and responsibility that both comforts and destabilizes, capturing the fragile balance between independence and connection in the messiness of contemporary life.