Netflix is great for letting you indulge in old favourites, suggesting terrible movies, and also providing access to sweet, foreign coming of age films you’d otherwise never have heard of.
Turn Me On, Dammit is one of the latter. It’s a neat little movie about Alma, a horny 15-year old girl in an incredibly small town in rural Norway.
So many of us can relate to the feelings of adolescent isolation that Alma personifies. Exiled by her peers, who’ve cast her out for telling her friends that the boy she likes poked her with his dick at a party, Alma faces the harsh judgement of teen isolation (and the ridiculous nickname of Dick-Alma). Underlying this social exile, Alma, along with her best friend Sara, feel trapped in the middle of nowhere, isolated in a town they hate.
The film is uneven, at times delving a little strangely into Alma’s sexual fantasies, or offering odd scenes without much narrative significance, but the funny moments manage to make up for the awkwardness. There are some truly laugh out loud lines in this dialogue, and elements of this high school social narrative that beg to be laughed at, at least in retrospect.
For all the awkward high school social drama and sexual fantasies, there are two things this film knocks out of the park: the realism evoked in that adolescent longing to escape from a stifling hometown, and an absolutely spot-on, fantastic ending.
Great endings are incredibly hard to come by (and hard to endorse, without giving them away!), but Turn Me On, Dammit has one of the best! (You’ll just have to trust me!)
