Turn Me On, Dammit!

Directed by Jannicke Systad Jacobsen

(Not rated)

***

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Countless films document the “awkward adventures of teenage boys consumed with getting laid,” said Alison Willmore in Movieline.com. So it’s “awfully refreshing” to see a teenage heroine wrestling with sexual desire “instead of just being the object of someone else’s.” In this “salty-sweet” comedy from Norway, 15-year-old Alma (Helene Bergsholm) fills her enervating small-town life with so many carnal daydreams that the audience can’t be sure at first if the incident that makes her a social pariah is real or imagined. The movie’s dry humor “tends to distance the viewer” from Alma’s resulting pain, said Ian Buckwalter in NPR.org. There’s also “nothing particularly revelatory” about a story that merely serves to remind us that “high school remains, as ever, a cruel and lonely place to have a sexual awakening.” Dammit is, at best, “a minor, feather-light film,” said Jon Frosch in TheAtlantic.com. But it’s also “a vivid and funny one”—perhaps the perfect choice on an evening when you “want to see a raunchy teen movie that won’t make you feel stupider for having watched it.”