Review: An artist finds a muse, and a junkie finds a friend, in fascinating documentary 'The Painter and the Thief'

An artist never knows the form a muse will take or where that muse will take the artist — as the documentary “The Painter and the Thief” demonstrates through its fascinating twists and turns.

The story begins with Barbora Kysilkova, a Czech-born painter living in Oslo, Norway. Known for her large naturalist paintings, she had a major exhibition at an Oslo gallery in 2015, when two men broke into the gallery and stole two large canvases off their wooden supporting frames.

One thief, Karl-Bertil Nordlund, was caught quickly, but he couldn’t remember — because of the haze of his heroin addiction — where the paintings wound up. In court, Kysilkova approached Nordlund with an odd request: She wanted him to model for her. Nordlund agreed, and the rest of director Benjamin Ree’s film follows the progression of that artist/model relationship.

Through this story, which has plot twists too outlandish for a fictional film, Ree explores the give and take between artist and subject, and the weight of responsibility for a remorseful criminal and a forgiving victim. Rees presents both sides of the story fairly equally, with Kysilkova’s story and Nordlund’s dovetailing in unexpected ways all the way to a surprising final shot.

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‘The Painter and the Thief’

★★★1/2

Debuts Friday, May 22, as a digital rental on various streaming platforms. Not rated, but probably R for images of nudity, and for language. Running time: 102 minutes; in Norwegian, with subtitles.

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This review appeared previously on this website, on January 23, 2020, when the movie premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.