The director is all wrong. Just as you wouldn’t call on Quentin Tarantino to make a movie about Monet and his waterlilies, Lasse Hallström is a perplexing choice for a biopic about the Swedish outsider artist Hilma af Klint. Hallström is the soft-centred director of sweet-natured heart-tuggers such as Chocolat and A Dog’s Purpose. Af Klint was completely unknown when she died in 1944, and is now finally getting the recognition she deserves; Tate Modern in London is staging an exhibition of her mystical abstract canvases next year. Under Hallström’s mushy direction, her life story is simplified, sweetened and feelgood-ified.
Still, there are some cracking performances, including by the director’s daughter Tora Hallström, who plays Hilma as a free-spirited carefree young woman with fiercely present, intense blue eyes. Raised in a nice, educated middle-class family, Hilma starts attending seances after the death of her beloved 10-year-old sister. So begins her lifelong obsession with spiritualism and mysticism. Cloyingly, in a handful of squirmy scenes, Hallström wheels out the consumptively pale ghost of Hilma’s sister, appearing to her in visions.
