Joachim Trier Has Put Oslo on the Cinematic Map

If you walk through the elegant neighborhood of Frogner, in Oslo, you may notice a house that doesn’t fit in with the understated apartment buildings and embassies nearby. It’s not that the house is ugly or run-down. Rather, it evokes a cottage from a fairy tale. Clad in dark wood with a steeply gabled roof, it has squiggles of cherry-red trim, like decorations on a birthday cake. Norwegians call such architecture dragestil, or “dragon style,” a late-nineteenth-century aesthetic recalling Viking ships and wooden-stave churches.