“Butterfly mostly works as a vehicle for the two excellent actresses at its heart.”

Renate Reinsve keeps getting stuck in dysfunctional Norwegian families. First she had to deal with a director father who prioritized art over family in Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value (which netted her an Oscar nomination, not bad); and in her latest film Butterfly by another compatriot, Itonje Søimer Guttormsen, she has to settle the death of a mother who had a peculiar way of raising children, to say the least. Sporting a number of bizarre and clashing outfits that would have any stylist running for the hills, Reinsve and co-lead Helene Bjørneby navigate a path to self-discovery and re-discovery in a spiritual film filled with eccentric characters, especially their mother Vera (Lillian Müller).

Lily (Reinsve) and Diana (Bjørneby), estranged sisters who haven’t seen each other in years, find out that their mother, equally estranged, has died under suspicious circumstances on the island of Gran Canaria. Diana works at a kindergarten in Norway, while Lily is a former model-turned-performance artist in Hamburg. Not only the distance separates them, as people they also couldn’t be further apart. The oil vs. water dynamic of the two – with Diana being the caring, self-effacing middle-aged woman who fakes a disability, and Lily the extravagant and maladjusted outsider who has a tendency for insult – promises fireworks when they meet on the island where they grew up together, in the resort where their mother used to work, to deal with her untimely demise. To their surprise, they are told that Vera left them an old observatory which she was turning into a spiritual retreat together with her much younger partner Chato (Numan Acar), who is now a suspect in the investigation into Vera’s death.

Suddenly they must join forces, but with this return to a place where they spent their earliest years, demons from the past also come back to the surface. Vera’s unorthodox parenting methods, which allowed the girls to hit the bottle before even remotely reaching high school age, along with suggestions that Vera, a proponent of free love and open sexuality, nudged a teenage Lily into the bed of a famous photographer, have caused a rift between the two sisters as Lily accuses Diana of standing by idly when all this happened. They split and decide to each follow the traces of their mother’s time on the island by meeting Vera’s friends, drifters and dreamers looking to make a new world for themselves. Independent from each other, the two sisters go on an unexpectedly esoteric, spiritual journey that eventually will bring them harmony.

A film centered on the way people handle grief and healing differently, your mileage with Butterfly may vary depending on how willing you are to go with the new age spirituality that becomes part of the film in the second half. It is not for lack of effort on the part of both lead actresses though: Bjørneby is excellent as the mousy woman who harbours a secret, and the actress traces the difficulties Diana has with giving herself over to the spiritual healing in the caves of Gran Canaria exceptionally well; Reinsve meanwhile, with a ghastly haircut and an even more disturbing wardrobe, works through her character’s trauma, caused by her mother, with customary aplomb. Her Lily is a far cry from Nora in Sentimental Value or Julie in The Worst Person in the World, which shows the actress’ versatility (anyone who has seen Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel’s Armand was probably already aware of this).

The narrative itself becomes a bit muddled, getting lost in the rituals and shamans that both characters encounter, to the point where you wonder why there is so much emphasis on the people they meet along their spiritual journey. Søimer Guttormsen divides her film into chapters with title names such as ‘Purgatory’ or ‘Desarmado’ (Spanish for ‘unarmed’) to distinguish which part of the journey is to come, but that makes the film schematic. She wisely eschews the imagery that so many tourists come to Gran Canaria for, instead opting to show how these endless strings of hotels and resorts mar the island’s beauty and are slowly encroaching on the more pristine and authentic island, contrasting the image most people have of the place with what Lily and Diana encounter. The film does try to find the beauty within though, and through the clashing personalities of the protagonists shows that everyone should be allowed their own path to discovery. A character drama about moving on and finding yourself, Butterfly mostly works as a vehicle for the two excellent actresses at its heart.