‘The Painter and the Thief’ review; Dir. Benjamin Ree (2020) [LFF]

From Benjamin Ree, the filmmaker behind the superb 2016 feature, comes his next work, absolutely one of the best documentaries of the year. The events depicted in The Painter and the Thief are so well told that you’ll leave wondering if you’ve witnessed a true story or a  tightly-woven, intricately written, multi-layered, non-linear structured piece of narrative drama. It’s excellent.

The film starts with a robbery. Two massive paintings by Czech artist Barbora Kysilkova have been stolen from an Oslo gallery. We see the heist pulled off via security cameras from within the building, the two criminals intricately removing the canvasses from their frames and exiting through a back door. One of them is heavily tattooed Karl-Bertil Nordland who we find out has been caught and charged with the crime in the following scenes. At his court hearing, Kysilkova is heard approaching Nordland as they wait for proceedings to take place, and her unexpected conversation with him is a request to paint him as soon as she is able to.

What follows is the painter and the thief’s relationship that forms over the following weeks and months, Ree’s camera constantly following both of them as Nordland visits Kysilkova’s studio to sit for said painting, through the the work’s completion and beyond, the documentary flitting forwards and back in time, often re-treading the same ground from both person’s perspective.

I loved everything about this. It’s an unbelievable, completely involving story that will sit with you for days after viewing. It is raw, and unflinching, but also beautiful and deeply intimate. The story is captivating throughout, the two protagonists’ unlikely friendship growing as their story unfolds. Its stunning conclusion is personified by a beautiful final shot, haunting and thought-provoking all by itself. A superb piece of work that establishes Ree as one of the most diverse and exciting documentarians working today.