Something that happened at school is debated and “measures” are weighed and furiously argued and even experienced through interpretive dance in the challenging but slow feature filmmaking debut of Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel, the grandson of the great actress Liv Ullmann.

“Armand” thus immediately invites interpretation and appreciation as a sort of extension of Grandma Ullmann’s work as the muse of the Swedish master Ingmar Bergman. Quiet, deliberately pacing from emotionally repressed to potentially explosive, Norway’s official submission for the Best International Feature Oscar can be a frustrating and obscure essay on Scandivanian emotions and cinematic symbolism.

“Armand” didn’t make the Oscar cut, but Tøndel did earn a Director’s Guild nomination. And the film stands out as a fine example of a so-called “Cannes” film — obscure, novel and a beneficiary of the groupthink that sets in at film festivals and on festival juries.

Renate Reinsve of “The Worst Person in the World” plays Elisabeth, a parent urgently summoned to a parent-teacher conference at school.

The whispers among the faculty and staff are that “It’s Armand, again,” suggesting a problem child. Elisabeth has to be dealt with gingerly, as “she’s a public figure” (an actress). And her son’s young teacher, Sunna (Thea Lambrechts Vaulen) assures her principal (Øystein Røger) that she’ll approach this “diplomatically,” maintaining her quiet and “sober” composure.

And she assures Elisabeth accordingly, that this is no big deal, nothing urgent, nothing to worry about. She lies.

Elisabeth’s six year-old son did something to another boy in school. He used language beyond the knowledge of most six year-olds. And what he did was serious and sexual enough to suggest “measures,” child welfare and even police involvement.

We don’t meet Armand until much later. We never meet his alleged victim. And we don’t really know what happened, just what other teachers heard from the boys. We just puzzle over Norwegian protocols on such matters and how clumsy, clueless and out-of-their-depth almost everybody in this school is to deal with this — especially the older principal.

“We have to be tolerant of anything now,” he grouses.

What we learn — from the “meetings” between parent and the young teacher (Alone?!), then parent and a couple of teachers and eventually parent with teachers and the principal — is that Elisabeth went to school here. So did Armand’s father. So did a couple of the teachers regarded as witnesses, the first to hear of the incident from the victim and wonder about his bruises.

Most of them have known each other all their lives. There are relationships and relatives and grievances that extend beyond this shocking alleged assault, and they either “explain” it as a judgment on Elisabeth’s parenting situation, or undercut it due to old grievances.

Writer-director Tøndel’s approach is to tease this out and let it all unfold ever-so-slowly. Scene after scene drags, even when something dramatic is happening. Elisabeth cracks up, at one point, launching into a laughing jag that goes on an on.

And that’s before she imagines herself persecuted and touched and poked at in an interpretative dance take on her dilemma.

One staffer has stress-nosebleeds. Are they a “tell” about how out of her depth she is? Others have “complications” that point to motive.

“Armand” is entirely too grudging in letting slip the information that the viewer needs to form judgments and opinions that might later be undercut. A tale told under a cloud with unreliable witnesses, it’s a slow and soft spoken drama that too breaks the chilling spell Tøndel is trying to cast.

Rating: R, profanity and sexual content

Cast: Renate Reinsve, Ellen Dorrit Petersen, Endre Hellestveit, Vera Veljovic-Jovanovic, Thea Lambrechts Vaulen and Øystein Røger

Credits: Scripted and directed by Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:57