29/07/2026 - Sunniva Eir Tangvik Kveum’s assured feature film debut turns adolescent loneliness and eco-fascist recruitment into a taut, highly contemporary thriller

At the heart of Sunniva Eir Tangvik Kveum’s debut film Nipster is seventeen-year-old Chris (Saga Stenman), who feels insignificant, isolated and increasingly powerless in the face of a world apparently sliding towards catastrophe. Following a conflict at her riding school, she accepts her friend Maja’s invitation to attend a summer camp for environmentally engaged youngsters. In the Swedish countryside, amidst communal activities and promises of meaningful action, Chris finds the sense of purpose she’s been missing. But the group’s ecological ideals gradually reveal a racist, eco-fascist agenda, increasingly directed against a nearby refugee centre.

World-premiered in Malmö's BUFF and recently screened in Giffoni’s Generator +15 competition, Nipster takes its title from a contraction of “Nazi” and “hipster”: extremists who replace the stereotypical skinhead uniform with fashionable clothes, environmental awareness and an ostensibly progressive vocabulary. This contradiction supplies the film with its most disturbing idea: radicalisation doesn’t necessarily enter Chris’s life through overtly threatening figures; it arrives disguised as friendship, activism and the reassuring sensation of finally being useful.

Kveum and screenwriter Sarah Olsson understand that Chris doesn’t initially need to share the organisation’s ugliest convictions, she just needs to enjoy being noticed. Her political conversion consequently unfolds through incremental concessions: moments when discomfort is suppressed, cruelty is reframed as necessity and loyalty to the group becomes more important than individual judgement. Stenman gives a compellingly restrained performance, allowing Chris’s hunger for approval and growing moral unease to coexist without reducing her to victim or fanatic.

The youth and adult performers form an unusually well-oiled ensemble, sustaining an atmosphere in which hierarchy remains tangible even during apparently casual exchanges. The recruiters are persuasive because they’re not presented as cartoon villains. Their methods rely on intimacy, repetition and emotional pressure, while the younger participants reproduce their language to secure their own standing within the group.

At just 78 minutes long, the pic moves with impressive economy. Editor Emma Lagrelius maintains a steadily quickening pace, whilst Jan Bastian Muñoz Marthinsen’s confident cinematography exploits the contradiction between the beauty of the rural setting and the menace growing within it. Kveum also intersperses the narrative with a carefully measured dose of social-media language and imagery. These intrusions never become a stylistic gimmick; instead, they make ideological violence feel circulated, performative and frighteningly easy to consume.

As the group’s intentions become explicit, Nipster occasionally approaches psychological horror. Everyday spaces acquire a cult-like unease, and the mounting sense that something irreversible is about to unfold proves more unsettling than any conventional suspense mechanism. When violence arrives, Kveum neither spares the audience nor resorts to sensationalism: its visibility is essential in order to puncture the seductive rhetoric that preceded it.

The film’s condensed running time leaves some secondary figures and ideological transitions only very lightly sketched out. But this terseness also prevents the film from becoming a didactic catalogue of contemporary extremism. It’s a brave choice of subject for a directorial debut, requiring a sizeable ensemble and a tricky tonal balance between youth drama, political warning and thriller, but Kveum handles this with considerable assurance. In an era when extremist movements have learnt to channel hatred through the aesthetics and anxieties of younger generations, Nipster doesn’t merely feel timely, it also feels alarmingly plausible.

Nipster was produced by Carbs Film (Sweden) in co-production with Film i Skåne (Sweden).