Stolen Memories (2026)
Some short films set themselves a question so large that you almost feel the running time straining against it, and Stolen Memories, Anders Davidsen's Norwegian short film, is one of those. I caught it through the BFI London Film Festival, and while I admired its restraint and its willingness to sit in deeply uncomfortable territory, I came away feeling it had opened a door it never really walked through. Two and a half stars, with the honest caveat that it is working in a difficult, delicate register and I want to be fair to what it was attempting.
The premise is quietly unsettling. Eighteen-year-old Emil, in the disarray following a break-in at his childhood home, comes across old photographs of himself as a young boy in the bath with his mother. What might once have read as ordinary family images suddenly refuse to stay innocent, and the film is really about the vertigo that follows, the way a single ambiguous object can make a person start to interrogate their own past and wonder whether the memories they have always trusted are the whole truth.
That is a genuinely rich idea, and for a while Davidsen handles it with a commendably light touch. Rather than spelling anything out, the film lets doubt do the work, and there is real tension in watching Emil turn something over and over without being able to resolve it. The craft supports it well, with Benjamin Loeb's cinematography keeping everything hushed and close, and a mood of creeping unease that never tips into melodrama. It was awarded for its screenplay on the festival circuit, and you can see why the setup drew attention.
Where it lost me is in the follow-through. Having raised something this weighty, the film neither delves far enough into Emil's shifting sense of his own history nor arrives anywhere that feels like a meaningful resolution. It gestures at the questions and then simply stops, and I was left holding an unease that the film itself seemed unsure what to do with. The ambiguity that makes the opening so effective curdles slightly into a sense of a story that has been set up but not paid off.
Two and a half stars. Stolen Memories is sensitively made and brave in its choice of subject, and its young lead carries the growing doubt convincingly, so there is clearly talent here. I just think it needed a little more time, or a little more nerve, to follow its own premise somewhere. As it stands it is an intriguing, troubling fragment that lingers more for the question it poses than for anything it manages to say about it.
Related on Movies With Macca
More from Country Norway: Quo Vadis, Aida? (2020), The Ugly Stepsister (2025), You Will Die at Twenty (2019)
More from the 2020s: All That's Left of You (2025), The Whale (2022), Look Back (2024)
More drama: I Will Be Alright (2026), Delisted (2026), Lady (2026)
