Review | Royalteen – Norwegian Teen Romance is a mix of ‘The Princess Diaries’ and ‘Mean Girls’

Apparently, in the northern hemisphere, it’s quite common for people to go to school or work and suddenly bump into a member of the royal family. Perhaps because there are still many countries under the monarchy around there, and this ends up being reflected in the audiovisual, whether in productions like “A Princesa ea Plebeia”, in which the twin of the protagonist simply bumps into her and decides to switch places, or as in “Treatment of Royalty”, in which the prince decides to have his hair cut at an ordinary New York barber and falls in love with her. If for centuries royalty kept a facade of distant and inaccessible people, today the idea is precisely to deconstruct this and show them as ordinary beings – and romance films have helped a lot in this mission. Like the first “Royalteen”, a Norwegian teen romance that just arrived on Netflix.

Lena (Ines Høysæter Asserson) is a young woman who has just moved with her family to Oslo, the capital of Norway. It’s her first day at school and her mother (Veslemøy Mørkrid) is super excited because her daughter will be studying in the same room as the crown princes to the throne. To Lena’s surprise, Prince Kalle (Mathias Storhøi) is not only friendly, but seems interested in her. As the days go by, Lena realizes that her heart is also swinging for the heir to the throne, but this begins to bother Princess Margrethe (Elli Rhiannon Müller Osborne), who will do anything to separate the two and keep the crown safe.

At one and forty, ‘Royalteen’ starts well and develops nicely, but by the final plot arc, everything seems to be rolling downhill with nothing to hold on to. Based on the book by Randi Fuglehaug and Anne Gunn Halvorsen, Ester Schartum-Hansen’s screenplay centers on this protagonist who appears to be a young woman with an ordinary family, in an ordinary life, but suddenly the screenplay begins to insert a lot of sinister information and background for a character the viewer must connect with and root for; being hit, all of a sudden, with a lot of questionable actions by Lena, we start to doubt if we really want her to be with the charismatic prince, who is good people.

Part of this problem must also be attributed to the direction of Per-Olav Sørensen and Emilie Beck, which builds the whole plot in a mood of teenage romance only to, out of nowhere, turn the whole thing into a kind of “Mean Girls” veiled and end its plot with an open ending, implying that there may be a sequel. Well, the problem is that for over an hour of screening, there’s been no indication of a sequel, so suddenly being surprised by a bunch of unresolved reasons and issues seems like a push to warrant more movies.

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Despite this production greed, “Royalteen” is a cute teen romance, starring a lovable prince and straight out of the same old British royal productions. As we learned in Las Encinas, from ‘Elite’, mixing the commons with royalty is the envy of many, even in Norway.

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