Jakob Verbruggen makes psychological thrillers uncomfortable by keeping us close to people with something to hide. We rate his control of tension and his attention to character.
Fi1m perspective
Jakob Verbruggen holds on a face long enough for watching to start feeling intrusive. Working with cinematographers including P.J. Dillon, he uses lingering shots, point-of-view framing and handheld movement to keep us uncomfortably close. We rate his willingness to let a thriller slow down while someone thinks or conceals what they are thinking. The camera need not discover a fresh piece of evidence in every scene; sometimes the person being watched is enough to sustain the tension.
The breakthrough was The Fall (2013), for which he directed the entire first series. He followed it with all five episodes of London Spy (2015), another opportunity to build tension over more than a single instalment. For The Alienist (2018), he was lead director on the first three episodes and an executive producer, bringing historical research to a period thriller. His interest in secrets and troubled characters carried through the change of setting.
Black Mirror shows why we value this kind of seriousness, and where our patience ends. We were unsettled by the series because its performances made the distress matter, however absurd the circumstances. Its straight-faced absurdity earns our recommendation, although it can keep tightening the screws after the point is already clear. Verbruggen directed Men Against Fire (2016), in the third series; that is one contribution to an anthology, so the praise and the reservation belong to the programme as a whole rather than to his episode alone.
Later directing credits include Invasion (2021) and Dark Matter (2024), continuing his substantial television work. The longer form suits his interest in character, provided each extra stretch gives us more than another look at somebody's worry. We would start with the first series of The Fall, for the ensemble direction and the pacing across a complete run of episodes.
Biography
Jakob Verbruggen is a Belgian television and film director. He was born in Merksem in 1980 and studied at the Royal Institute for Theatre, Cinema and Sound (RITCS) in Belgium.
He has directed all episodes of the first series of The Fall (2013) and all five episodes of London Spy (2015). His other credits include two episodes of House of Cards (2016), the Black Mirror episode 'Men Against Fire' (2016), the first three episodes of The Alienist (2018), an episode of The Twilight Zone (2019), four episodes of Invasion (2021) and three episodes of Dark Matter (2024). He won the Joseph Plateau Award in 2002.
