Baran bo Odar makes puzzle thrillers and shoots them dead straight: symmetrical frames, faces looked at head-on, a grey-green forest and a power plant on every horizon. With Jantje Friese writing, the puzzles are actually solved, and Dark is the proof.
Fi1m perspective
Watch where bo Odar puts a thing in the frame. The cave mouth in Dark sits in the dead centre of the picture, a black hole with the forest arranged around it. The cooling towers stand on every horizon. People are photographed from the front, level, held a beat longer than is comfortable, and the debt to Kubrick is plain. Then the cut: the same spot in the forest, or the same kitchen, in another year, with the wallpaper changed and the faces a generation younger. It is one trick, and across 26 episodes it never wore out.
He trained in directing at the Munich film school from 1998 and met Jantje Friese there, which is the most useful fact on his CV. After shorts, commercials and music videos came The Silence (2010), a thriller, then Who Am I (2014), a hacker film about identity that did well in Germany and got him noticed abroad. Sleepless (2017), an American remake with Jamie Foxx, was his one studio job, and most critics found it a formulaic action film. Then the series: Dark, from 2017 to 2020, every episode directed by him and written with Friese, and 1899 (2022), which ended after a single season.
Dark is the case for him and it is a strong one. Nikolaus Summerer shoots Winden's forest in a wet green that is nearly grey; Udo Kramer builds the past out of the same houses with browner wallpaper and a Walkman on the desk; Ben Frost's score is a low hum with a two-note pulse under it, like a clock that has stopped caring. Bo Odar once described the mystery serial's method as "many questions, a few answers, and when you give an answer you have to ask the next question straight away", and the rare thing about Dark is that eventually it stops asking and pays out. The first time the cutting matched a patch of forest to the same patch decades earlier, we felt the ground shift under the sofa, and it kept happening and we kept feeling it.
What he does not do is people. Our review called the cast of Dark pieces on a board, and that is the standing charge against him: the pattern comes first, and nobody caught in it gets a happy ending, by his own account. Some German critics thought Dark too polished, too close to American television, and there is something in that, though the polish is what lets the trick work. The plainer worry is what happens when the pattern is not finished. 1899 stopped after one season, and a bo Odar puzzle is only worth anything once the last piece is in.
So start with Dark, and start knowing you will be asked to keep a ledger. He will keep his side of it. Whether anyone lets him finish the next one is not in his hands.
Biography
Baran bo Odar is a German film and television director and screenwriter. He was born on 18 April 1978 in Olten, Switzerland, and studied directing at the University of Television and Film Munich, where he met his creative and romantic partner, Jantje Friese.
Odar is known for co-creating the Netflix series Dark (2017–2020) with Friese, directing every episode, and for directing the films The Silence (2010), Who Am I (2014) and Sleepless (2017). He directed and co-created the series 1899 (2022) with Friese. Who Am I reached the top of the German cinema charts and was nominated for German Film Awards. Odar received a Grimme-Preis in 2018 for his direction of the first season of Dark.
