“Hilma” (2022) is a period biopic about Swedish painter Hilma af Klint, who is considered the mother of abstract art. Writer and director Lasse Hallstrom’s paints a portrait of an artist whose art was not abstract, but a peek into the spirit world. af Klint treated painting as a religious practice, spiritism, communicating with the spirits of dead people. His daughter, Tara Hallstrom, plays the titular painter as a younger woman, and his wife, Lena Olin, plays her at the end of her life. The film charts her journey: how she got interested in spiritism and painting, how she met The Five, four other spiritualist women whom she met while going to school at the Academy of Fine Arts, then merged painting and spiritism into automatism. Automatism occurs when an artist suppresses her consciousness and channels the “High Masters,” a concept never fully conveyed in the film, but perhaps ascended beings who have died and live in a different dimension, on the other side, and are guiding the painter’s hand when painting. af Kint eventually struck a balance between channeling creativity and asserting her own vision in her work. Hallstrom frames her as a Moses figure who never makes it to the Promised Land, i.e., she never witnesses her highest aspiration come true, a temple to art, but implies that it did with Manhattan’s Guggenheim Museum.
“Hilma” should be my kind of movie. I love period films about women, especially when they have a particular spiritual bent or are artists, but this one was dull as dishwater. I tried to watch it on April 17th, gave up and revisited it on July 4th. While af Klint lived a life of constant spiritual ecstasy, the film never conveys that emotion. In contrast, Ari Aster’s first two films depict unfamiliar, disturbing religious practices, but despite any horrifying elements, these true believers’ fervor is infectious, and it is easy to grasp the community’s practices. I am not saying that af Klint’s religious reliefs are horrifying, but if I can understand and relate on an emotional level something repugnant and irredeemable, filmmakers should be able to convert a viewer in a less sensational context. Instead Hallstrom conveys af Klint’s devotion with heavy-handed spiritualist dogma and animation with mixed, uneven results that only convey a superficial understanding of af Klint’s passion.
Based on the way that the story is framed—opening and closing with a Guggenheim docent speaking about af Klint’s work, the filmmaking family credit af Klint as a prophet, not a madwoman, but the depiction leans more towards the latter. The film sympathizes with af Klint as if she was an invalid, a casualty of grief after the death of her beloved little sister. Hallstrom shows af Klint through the eyes of those who did not believe in her instead of the people who agreed with her. A viewer should leave “Hilma” eager to sign up for a séance, another spiritism religious practice, and relating to the attraction of spiritism. There is one scene where af Klint movies like a whirling dervish that shows a seed of promise if it could have been sustained.
Hallstrom gives a superficial depiction of the Five that never goes deeper than what a passerby could observe. Hallstrom gives shot after shot of them engaging in group activities, but not what they were like as individuals or how the group dynamic felt from the inside. He did not get friendships among women, but he was more daring in embracing same sex romantic relationships and the ensuing conflicts, but I’ll defer to lesbians regarding whether he did a good job. At least he is not just content to say that a same sex couple were good friends or roommates. When watching “Hilma,” take the following challenge: can you name all four of the members, not including af Klint? Anna Cassel (Catherine Chalk) does not count because Hallstrom gives two distinct details about her: she is af Klint’s first love interest and is wealthy. Mathilda Nesson (Lily Cole) is the editor of a spiritualism periodical, and Cornelia Cederberg (Rebecca Calder) drew the illustrations, but was not wealthy enough to get educated like af Klint. Sigrid Hedman (Maeve Dermody) is introduced as a charismatic speaker, a medium and a mother.
If you walked away thinking that Cassel was from another country, you would be wrong. Cassel was Swedish. Do not blame Chalk, who does a great job of hinting at her character’s growing displeasure and disenchantment with spiritualism as her relationship with af Klint feels more mercenary. Hallstrom decides to make his film more marketable by making sure that the Swedish characters’ dialogue is English, so it eliminated the need to cast actors who spoke Swedish. I seriously thought that Cassel was from Ireland (Chalk is not from Ireland so that is my bad…sorry ignorant American). It changes the story if viewers think someone is from another country instead of a native.
Hallstrom did illustrate inequity well by showing, not telling. “Hilma” keeps men on the borders as nuisances or depicts them as insensitive. They are shown leering at the group of women or interrupting them. They are often inconvenient except for the sensitive Edvard Munch (Paulius Markevicius) who hugs af Klint and conveys the emotion behind the movement more effectively than most of the dialogue. Without any prose dumps about the law, Hallstrom shows the family dynamic, who is valued and gets money and who is not. Big surprise: it goes by gender. Thankfully there are no moments where af Klint does not complain about the men in her family inheriting the money. Instead Hallstrom compares how her siblings live and dress and the downward trajectory of her mother’s exile from the main house.
Tom Wlaschiha, whom most viewers may recognize as Game of Throne’s Arya’s assassin mentor, plays af Klint’s hero Rudolf Steiner, who is no ally and crushes her work and drive with his judgment. Wlaschiha is the only captivating, charismatic character. Internalized misogyny and patriarchy keep af Klint in Steiner’s thrall and stymies her from being as free as she could have been. He is also the only character who speaks another language.
Hallstrom also seems to imply that grief and spiritualism made af Klint have an eating disorder. At the dinner table soon after her sister’s death, she plays with her food. To better channel the High Masters, she would abstain from eating until her hunger overcame her, and she would eat anything in hand’s reach. A through line between mother and daughter’s performances is the compulsion to stress binge eat. Daughter Hallstrom reminded me of a young Emily Watson, but perhaps it was too demanding for her to play the character as she got older. I did not recognize Olin, whom I loved as Irina Derevko, spy mom of Sydney Bristow in Alias.
Visually I preferred “Hilma” when Hallstrom did not use CGI to colorize old archival footage then insert the cast. It was very awkward and kept taking me out of the movie as a seamless window into the past. The black and white, subterranean version of the other side worked, and the pastoral scenes explain why af Klint could transition from science to painting. When Hallstrom represents how af Klimt channeled the High Masters, it already felt dated as the colors dance around. It works better upon her deathbed, instead of reaching for the light, a montage of her spiral work flashes on the screen. This solitary film about the artist is uneven, earnest, and passionless.
