Paul Keelan
Benjamin Ree’s The Painter and the Thief from 2020 is one of those rare documentaries that bends reality into something so disarmingly strange and emotionally vertiginous that it rivals the most daring works of fiction. I went in expecting a quirky crime documentary about an art heist in Oslo, and I left feeling rattled, spellbound, and, ultimately, moved in ways I hadn’t experienced since The Act of Killing, another experimental documentary film that left me wondering whether the boundaries between staged artifice and raw reality had collapsed altogether.
The premise sounds straightforward enough. In 2015, two of Barbora Kysilkova’s most prized paintings were stolen from an Oslo gallery. Police apprehended the culprit, Karl-Bertil Nordland, within days, but the paintings remained missing. And yet, instead of demanding answers in court or hiring a private investigator, Barbora does something borderline absurd, perverse, and reckless: she covertly propositions the thief to paint his portrait. Out of this bizarre setup blossoms one of the most surreal, confounding, and strangely tender relationships I’ve witnessed onscreen.
Much like Honeyland (another excellent foreign documentary), The Painter and the Thief carries a disorienting sense of being too perfectly metaphorical to be entirely real. Certain narrative developments—the miraculous discovery of a painting rolled up in a filthy storage room, the uncanny symmetry between Bertil’s descent and Barbora’s unraveling—feel orchestrated, like plot points in a novel. And yet, the rawness of the performances (if I can even call them “performances”) resists any suspicion of artifice.
When Barbora finds the missing canvas, unfurls it, and lays her entire body across it in grief and ecstasy, the moment lands with such convulsive sincerity that no director could have staged it without cheapening it. Likewise, the first time Bertil sits before his own portrait, he breaks down in a mixture of disbelief, awe, and narcotic stupor. Yes, he is almost certainly high (Bertil is a drug addict). Yet, the trembling, tear-choked realization that he exists in the eyes of another human being, in paint and permanence, is so devastatingly authentic that it transcends chemical haze. In the moment, he does not see himself as a tabloid headline, a police mugshot, a lowlife survivor, or a criminal addict; he sees himself as an immortalized subject, a person with meaning and selfhood.
The heart of the The Painter and the Thief lies in the symbiotic, almost parasitic bond between Barbora and Bertil. On the surface, their connection is platonic. Beneath that surface simmers something far more psychologically charged: a magnetism of dependence, projection, and redemption. Barbora turns Bertil into her muse, painting him as if resurrecting his submerged humanity stroke by stroke. He, in turn, becomes her chaos, destabilizing the fragile order of her life even as he grants her artistic vitality.
The inversion is dizzying. Bertil, the junkie and convict, finds rehabilitation, stability, and a devoted friend. Barbora, an ostensibly disciplined artist, plunges into an existential and romantic crisis. Her relationship with her boyfriend, Øystein, strains as she becomes psychosexually entangled with a soul (Bertil) she’s intimate with yet never physically touches. Øystein becomes a tragicomic figure: a skeptical third wheel oscillating between jealous paranoia and genuine concern. One moment, he seems like a possessive, embittered, petty partner; the next, he emerges as the only rational voice pointing out the obvious: that Barbora is precariously tethering herself to someone capable of dragging her into oblivion.
This triangular tension is so rich and unresolved that I could imagine any of them wandering onto the set of a Lars von Trier melodrama (Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark) and blending seamlessly into his gallery of damaged souls. And yet, unlike von Trier’s descent-driven tragedies, The Painter and the Thief dares to end on a note of redemption. It offers a simple, radical proposition: that forgiveness can be more subversive and therapeutic than vengeance. Barbora could have treated Bertil as a criminal, a parasite, and an object of scorn. Instead, she approaches him with curiosity, empathy, and even love, presenting us with an unvarnished illustration of how privileging salvation over vindictiveness can resurrect a soul instead of damning it into further darkness.
This posture doesn’t absolve Bertil’s past; it transforms it. Through Barbora’s insistence on seeing him not as a thief but as a person worth painting, worth knowing, he begins to see himself anew. Ree underscores this metamorphosis through a poignant interlude that poetically reconstructs Bertil’s childhood, not merely to give him the easy alibis of a tragic/traumatic past but to offer him narrative depth and personal reclamation. The montage is a beautiful example of how empathizing instead of reductively vilifying can be restorative. We are reminded that behind every addict or convict is a story, often brutal, sometimes tragic, and always more than their rap sheet.
The alchemy is astonishing: under the scope of Barbora’s gaze, Bertil transcends his darker, even demonic shadow self. She paints not his degradation but his dignity. She sees the innermost beauty of his momentarily obfuscated soul and paints it on canvas. And in this aesthetic replication—in this edifying image—Bertil’s higher conscientiousness is reincarnated. We can see the rebirth in his eyes: aglow, alive, and trembling before the unspeakable uncanniness of his likeness rendered and rectified into a portraiture.
It would be unfair to assign all credit to Barbora alone. The documentary also gestures toward the structural scaffolding of Norwegian society—a system that, for all its flaws, still believes in rehabilitation. Watching Bertil receive physical therapy after a near-fatal car crash, psychiatric support, and humane incarceration conditions, one cannot help but compare Norway’s approach with the punitive machinery of the American carceral state.
In the United States, a man like Bertil (an addict, an art thief, a drug dealer, a repeat offender) would likely have been funneled into a cycle of prison, parole, relapse, and re-incarceration until his life burned out. In Norway, he is still seen as a human with intrinsic value and worth, receiving physical rehabilitation therapy, psychiatric care, and a humane jail cell that rivals the living conditions of many major American cities. That difference, stark as it is, raises uncomfortable questions about the cruelty of American policy and the countless lives crushed by a system more invested in punishment than in possibility.
A national reckoning feels overdue. We shouldn’t merely externalize our demands for reform onto institutions. We must take Barbora’s lead, whose extraordinary grace shows that redemption must also be individualized. We must realize that seeing another person not for their worst actions but for their buried humanity is a radical political act. It is easy to outsource compassion to social programs; harder, infinitely harder, to embody it in our private encounters. Barbora does both, reminding us that reform requires structural change and a collective reorientation toward the power of rehabilitation.
Led by her tortured, inquisitive quest of solicitude, The Painter and the Thief subtly evolves into a potent meditation on the transformative power of recognizing the untapped spirit and potential in our prospective enemies. Blurring the line between the victim and perpetrator, the rescuer and rescued, and the artist and subject, it unmoors our most basic assumptions about justice, goodness, and interpersonal triggers, giving us a new, saintlier model for reacting to indignities.
I don’t think I will soon forget the image of Bertil staring at his painted self—bewildered, broken, awed—as if seeing a future he thought forever foreclosed. Nor will I forget Barbora, sprawled across her rediscovered canvas, embracing it like a lost child returned from the dead. These moments remind us that art, in its most powerful form, is not about beauty or even truth. It is about deliverance: teaching us that forgiving is often the most sacred gesture we can make in a world predominantly governed by retribution.
