Sundance review: 'The Painter and the Thief' is a fascinating documentary with more twists than a thriller

‘The Painter and the Thief’

★★★1/2

Playing in the World Cinema Dramatic competition of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. Running time: 102 minutes.

Screens again: Friday, Jan. 24, 8:30 a.m., Egyptian (Park City); Friday, Jan. 24, 6 p.m., Resort (Sundance); Saturday, Jan. 25, 6 p.m., Tower (Salt Lake City); Thursday, Jan. 30, 6 p.m., Temple (Park City); Friday, Jan. 31, 3 p.m., Redstone 7 (Park City).

——

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.