“Thelma” begins in a remote stretch of wintry wilderness, where a man and his young daughter step gingerly across a frozen lake and into the woods nearby. The father has a rifle, presumably with the intention of shooting a fawn that pops into view. But after taking careful aim, he suddenly swings the weapon in an unexpected direction. The screen cuts to black before we see what happens next, but a powerful sense of unease takes hold. Who is the hunter in this picture, and who is the prey?

The answer isn’t entirely clear even a decade or so later, when we catch up with Thelma (an excellent Eili Harboe), a freshman biology student at a university in Oslo. Even for a first-year who finds herself adrift in a big city, Thelma seems unusually lonely. Her extreme isolation is driven home by an early shot that slowly picks her out in a crowded plaza with a slow, creeping zoom that recalls “The Conversation.” That isn’t the only 1970s American classic looming large over this movie, which at times plays like “Carrie” in Scandinavian deep freeze.

A muted and moody supernatural chiller, “Thelma” marks a first foray into quasi-horror territory for Norwegian director Joachim Trier, who scripted the film with his usual writing partner, Eskil Vogt. After 2015’s “Louder Than Bombs,” a sensitive if unpersuasive drama about an American family reeling from tragedy, Trier has returned to native soil, geographically at least, where he made his dazzling debut feature, “Reprise” (2006), and its wrenching follow-up, “Oslo, August 31st” (2011). What all these films share, apart from a love of formal innovation, is an acute sensitivity to the experiences of young people, and of the sorrow and disillusionment that seem to be their natural inheritance in any time or place.

Thelma, at least initially, seems to possess a narrower emotional register than most. She lives out of a suitcase in a sparsely furnished apartment. Her parents (Henrik Rafaelsen and Ellen Dorrit Petersen) are strict fundamentalist Christians who call her every day, peppering her with gentle but insistent questions about her schedule, her diet and the company she keeps.

Harboe’s performance is a compelling slow thaw, her unassuming mask of a face gradually flushing with color and feeling. That the film seems less interested in harnessing the full extent of her telekinetic abilities than in shaking her loose from her emotional repression is somehow more admirable than satisfying. You could read “Thelma” as a saga of Sapphic liberation, a fiery critique of religious patriarchy or perhaps yet another superhero’s traumatic origin story; it’s graceful and ambiguous enough to support each of these readings.