102 min | NR | May 22, 2020 | Neon
Someone steals two of Barbora Kysilkova’s paintings off a gallery wall. She tracks down the thief and asks to paint him. What starts as forgiveness becomes an obsession that runs in both directions.
Barbora Kysilkova is a hyperrealist painter living in Oslo. Two of her canvases vanish from a gallery in broad daylight. The police catch one of the men, Karl-Bertil Nordland, and Barbora does the thing no one expects. She approaches him in court and asks if she can paint his portrait. The film tracks the relationship that grows out of that request, and it is not a story about a victim and a criminal. It is about two damaged people who recognize their own wreckage in each other and decide to use that recognition for something.
Barbora carries the film with a watchfulness that never softens into sentimentality. She studies Karl-Bertil the way she studies a still life, and the camera catches the moment he sees his own portrait and breaks down completely. Karl-Bertil is an addict with a body covered in tattoos and a history of collisions, literal and otherwise. He answers Barbora’s question about why he stole the paintings with a line that detonates the film. He says he took them because they were beautiful. The honesty of that exchange sets the terms for everything that follows.
Benjamin Ree directs and writes, and his structural gambit is the engine of the whole thing. He tells the early stretch through Barbora’s eyes, then rewinds and retells the same events through Karl-Bertil’s. The repetition is not a gimmick. It forces you to watch a scene you already understand and discover that you understood half of it. Ree filmed Karl-Bertil over years, and the editing collapses that span so a recovery and a relapse sit minutes apart, which lets the documentary find the shape of a tragedy without inventing one.
The film is about looking, and about what it costs to be truly seen. Barbora needs Karl-Bertil as a subject the same way he needs her as a witness to a self he had given up on. Ree refuses to flatten either of them into a redemption arc, because real people do not resolve that cleanly. The result is a portrait of mutual dependence that earns its emotion through patience rather than manipulation. It watches two people save each other and has the discipline to admit that saving someone is never finished.