Anya (Helene Bergsholm) is a horny teenager who lives in sleepy Skoddenheimen, Norway. Sexually frustrated and bored with drinking beer at the bus stop, she spends a little too much time calling sex hotlines and jerking off on the kitchen floor.

At a Youth Centre party, her high school crush Artur (Matias Myren) publicly humiliates Alma. We aren’t suprised that mean classmates quickly turn on her and give her the nickname Dick Alma. Ostracized, she passes lunch hours crying in washroom stalls and attempts smoking hash to reclaim recess hierarchy. Turn Me On, Goddammit! takes us back to the locker room where seemingly trivial issues exploded into traumatizing dramas at record speed. Sigh…we’ve all been there.

Alienated and fed up, Anya hitchhikes to Helsinki and takes refuge with an older girl from her remote community whom she idolizes. Drinking red wine and getting serenaded by a hippie dude strumming a Dick Alma song raise her spirits. For an instant, Alma gets a little look into life after Skoddenheimen.

Although this flick sounds pervy it is refreshingly tender and sweet. Director Jannicke Systad Jacobsen has done a superb job of capturing that poignant time in adolescence when hormones trump common sense, emotions run wild, everything sucks and your mom just doesn’t get it.  The dialogue is perfect and relationships and feelings are portrayed so accurately that it feels like a window into a teen’s life, not a scripted film. There is nothing sensational about this story, and Berghsholm’s mischievous yet uncertain grin is reason enough to go see it.

Coming-of-age films often focus on teenage boy libidos, but we definitely remember being so incredibly horny that we mounted foreign objects and rode things just like Anya. It’s nice to see a film that captures that in an honest way. Girls masturbate too!