Isabella Eklöf watches people negotiate sex and power, often from an uncomfortable distance. We value her attention to who gets their way, though the coldness can make it hard to care who suffers.
Fi1m perspective
In Holiday (2018), the wide, brightly lit images keep us at a distance from a gangster’s girlfriend. Eklöf watches who has power and how it is used, without offering much explanatory backstory. We find that attention worth following, though the coldness can be wearing. This was her first feature as writer and director. Her writing also includes Border (2018), whose screenplay she co-wrote with Ali Abbasi and John Ajvide Lindqvist, expanding a short story into a feature about otherness.
Industry (2020) puts her interest in power among young bankers, with eight episodes directed across the second and third series. We cared about these people because the performances made their ambition convincing. The office politics give that ambition practical consequences throughout the working day. These are strengths of the programme, rather than achievements we would assign to one director alone. It is nevertheless an apt setting for Eklöf: professional advancement gives people a reason to accept behaviour they might prefer to think beneath them.
Her second feature, Kalak (2023), moves towards more intimate handheld images. Adapted from Kim Leine’s autobiographical novel and set in Greenland, it also credits Eklöf as an editor. The change from Holiday’s brightly lit compositions matters: keeping us at a distance is not her only method. Her recurring collaborators include cinematographer Nadim Carlsen, and the variation in the photography is encouraging. The sustained attention to abuse, however, can still make these films demanding company.
Our reservation returns us to Industry, where the sex and excess are less reliable than the workplace struggles, especially when they crowd them out. The same caution applies to following a director so willing to show difficult sexual material: explicitness alone is no reason to keep watching. We want her patient observation to help us understand the people, even when the camera stays back. Industry earns its recommendation through the performances and the complications of ambition. Start there if office politics appeal; approach the features prepared for explicit violence and little reassurance.
Biography
Isabella Eklöf (born 10 February 1978) is a Swedish film director and screenwriter. She attended the National Film School of Denmark and worked as a runner on the 2008 film Let the Right One In.
Eklöf wrote and directed the 2018 feature Holiday. She co-wrote the 2018 film Border with Ali Abbasi. Her other directorial credits include the 2023 film Kalak and episodes of the series Servant (2019) and Industry (2020), on which she directed eight episodes across seasons two and three.
For Border, Eklöf shared nominations for the Guldbagge Award for Best Screenplay and the European Film Award for Best Screenwriter. Holiday won awards at Fantastic Fest and four Bodil Awards, including Best Danish Film.
