The Painter and The Thief Offers The Best Kind Of True-Crime Bait-And-Switch

Reviewed by Kristy Puchko

Is there a word for cinema that lures you in with a dark promise, then delivers something profound, surprising, and humane instead? When I first saw the trailer for The Painter and The Thief, I thought I had its number, having seen myriad of true-crime docs. The tantalizing trailer teased a tale of two sides: the painter and the thief. I assumed theirs would be a story of victim and criminal, hero and villain, saint and sinner. However, what documentarian Benjamin Ree offers is far more compelling and so exhilarating that made me relish being wrong.

The story begins with a brazen crime. In broad daylight, Karl-Bertil Nordland and an accomplice strode into an Oslo gallery and plucked two paintings from their display frames, carting them out a backdoor. While the men were quickly caught, the paintings were not recovered. This left a lot of questions for the painter who made them. Czech artist Barbora Kysilkova was confounded, crushed, and curious about the theft. She wasn’t a big name, so why was her work stolen? Why those particular paintings? And what became of them? She also began to wonder what motivated the thieves. However, when she met Nordland face-to-face at his trial, the first question she asked was if he’d pose for a new painting. After he served his time, the convicted art thief visited her studio, where Kysilkova sketched him as Ree’s cameras looked on. So began the start of a strange friendship.