Environmental and climatic change has become a frequent motif in contemporary Norwegian literature, television and film, and Norway has the worldwide first organization of writers committed to climate action (The Norwegian Writers’ Climate Campaign, founded in 2013). In this article, we argue that Norwegian climate change fiction and related works draw on elements that relate to specific national and/or Nordic cultural, societal and historical aspects, and that these elements give these works their distinct identity. We focus on four such aspects: (1) references to Norwegian petroculture (since the Norwegian economy is largely based on the export of fossil fuels); (2) an (imagined) intimate connection between Norwegianness and nature, and thus of what often is seen as a typical element of Norwegian national identity; (3) notions of “Nordicity”, and (4) an atmosphere of gloom and melancholia in many of the works (which often has been ascribed to Nordic landscapes, and usually is characteristic for the genre of Nordic noir).

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This article argues that mental health and mental illness are important topics in Joachim Trier’s oeuvre. In Reprise (2006), two aspiring writers face multiple challenges when one of them suffers a mental breakdown and is hospitalized. Oslo, August 31st (2011) chronicles the final day of a depressed drug addict before he commits suicide. In Louder Than Bombs (2015), three family members try to process trauma and loss after the mother’s sudden death; the main character in Thelma (2017) struggles with emancipation while at the same time suffering from strange seizures, seemingly caused by some unidentified psychological issue. Focusing on close readings of central scenes in Oslo, August 31st and Thelma, the article investigates how the relationship between the protagonists and their environment is used to portray mental illness and create insight into the experience of depression and anxiety.

This text is a revised translation of the first chapter of Cinema Between Media; an Intermedial approach, Edinburgh UP, 2018. Small parts have been changed, and a reflection from the end of the book has been added to the end of the chapter.