Tobias Lindholm writes about what happens after the worst has already happened: the accusation accepted, the ship taken. He tells us the answer early and asks us to watch the people instead, and in The Hunt that is frightening enough.
Fi1m perspective
The useful thing to know about a Tobias Lindholm script is what it leaves out. In The Hunt (2012), written with Thomas Vinterberg, a child accuses a teacher of abuse and the film tells us at once that the man is innocent. There is no mystery. What is left is a small Danish town full of ordinary people deciding, one at a time, that worry about a child permits them to mistreat an adult they have known for years, and Lindholm and Vinterberg make us watch them do it. He has said of A Hijacking: "I never thought about writing the part where the pirates get on board the ship. I wasn’t interested in that. I’m not an action director."
He came up as a television writer, on twenty episodes of Borgen between 2010 and 2011, and has run two careers since. One is with Vinterberg, whose scripts he has shared on Submarino (2010), The Hunt, The Commune (2016) and Another Round (2020). The other is his own: R (2010), co-directed with Michael Noer, then A Hijacking (2012) and A War (2015), with Pilou Asbæk as his lead in three films. The method in both is the same. Handheld camera that follows people rather than steering the plot, dialogue that sounds overheard, and no scene in which anyone is allowed a big speech.
The method has two failure modes and we have seen both. The early Danish films were sometimes called austere to the point of withholding, and R drew that complaint more than most. The Hunt has the opposite trouble. Anne Østerud and Janus Billeskov Jansen cut the first spread of the accusation cleanly, and Mads Mikkelsen makes Lucas's distress hard to look at; we were frightened for him from the first whispered conversation onwards. Then the script keeps adding punishment. By the final stretch we had understood exactly what the town was doing to him and were being told again, and again, and the fear turned into fatigue. For a writer who says he hates melodrama, that is an odd place to end up, and it is our one real reservation about a film we otherwise rate.
Since 2017 he has worked in English as well, directing two episodes of Mindhunter for David Fincher, then The Investigation (2020) and The Good Nurse (2022), all of them built from things that actually happened. The series suits him: its interview scenes are cool, patient and nearly bloodless, and they are the best thing in it. Which episodes were his we would not care to guess from the screen. It is Fincher's programme and it looks like one.
He has said he finds his own imagination boring and would rather start from a case file. On the evidence, he knows himself. Start with The Hunt. You will have understood it before it has finished telling you, and that is the only complaint we have.
Biography
Tobias Lindholm is a Danish screenwriter and film director. He graduated from the National Film School of Denmark in 2007.
Lindholm first received attention for his work on the political drama series Borgen (2010). He has collaborated frequently with director Thomas Vinterberg on screenplays including Submarino (2010), The Hunt (2012), The Commune (2016) and Another Round (2020). As a director his credits include R (2010, co-directed with Michael Noer), A Hijacking (2012) and A War (2015), the latter nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. He also directed The Good Nurse (2022) and contributed teleplays to Mindhunter (2017).
