95 min | PG-13 | August 13, 2021 | Sony Pictures Classics
A painting surfaces at a New Orleans estate sale for $1,175. Fifteen years later it sells as a Leonardo da Vinci for $450 million. This documentary follows the money and finds that authenticity is whatever the right people decide to believe.
A battered panel of Christ turns up at a regional auction and a pair of dealers buy it on a hunch. They send it to a restorer who cleans away centuries of overpaint. What emerges gets attributed to Leonardo da Vinci and christened the Salvator Mundi. The film tracks this object through restorers, scholars, dealers, freeport vaults, oligarchs, and a Saudi crown prince. The real subject is not whether Leonardo painted it. The subject is how money manufactures certainty.
The film is built from interviews with the people who handled the painting and profited from it. Dianne Dwyer Modestini, the restorer, speaks about the work with genuine reverence and her conviction is the emotional anchor of the early sections. Martin Kemp, the da Vinci expert, lends scholarly weight while admitting how little hard evidence exists. Yves Bouvier, the freeport owner, treats the art world as a logistics and tax problem and barely conceals his contempt for the romance around it. Georgina Adam and Evan Beard explain the mechanics with the calm of people who know exactly how the sausage gets made.
Andreas Koefoed directs the material like a heist film and structures it in three movements covering the painting, the players, and the money. The script credited to Koefoed, Andreas Dalsgaard, Christian Kirk Muff, Mark Monroe, and Duska Zagorac withholds key reversals to keep the tension building. The camera lingers on the painting in tight, reverent close-ups, then cuts to fluorescent vaults and auction floors where the same object becomes pure collateral. A propulsive score pushes the interviews forward and turns provenance disputes into something that plays like a thriller. The contrast between the sacred image and the cold rooms it passes through is the whole argument.
This is a film about how value gets invented and who gets to invent it. Nobody can prove Leonardo touched the panel and nobody needs to, because the number does the persuading. The Louvre studies the painting and then declines to hang it under a Leonardo label, and that absence says more than any expert. Koefoed lets the players indict themselves by simply explaining their jobs. The painting vanishes into a vault at the end, and the film leaves you certain that the mystery was never the point.