A Danish director who puts the person before the plot, and who has spent a decade in America being hired to start things other people finish. His pilot for Mr. Robot shows what that steadiness is worth, and what the series lost when he left.
Fi1m perspective
The first hour of Mr. Robot (2015) belongs to Rami Malek's stare, and Niels Arden Oplev, who directed the pilot, has the sense to point the camera at it and hold. There is a voiceover, and in that opening episode it tells us only what the frame cannot. Sam Esmail's series would go on to look like nothing else on television, and by the second series, when Esmail was directing every episode himself, the style was running some way ahead of the story. Oplev's episode is plainer than anything that followed it, and the plainness was a decision, not a limit.
That is more or less the job he has been given in America since 2011: arrive, set the tone, hand over the keys. Under the Dome (2013) was another pilot. Before that he had a Danish career, out of the National Film School in 1989, through the feature debut Portland (1996) and television such as Rejseholdet and Ørnen, to We Shall Overcome (2006), the film that made his name at home. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009) made it everywhere else, and Noomi Rapace, who has worked with him twice, is the reason most people remember it. He has said of that film, "I’m a character-driven director. I’m interested in the human more than I’m interested in building suspense," which tells you what he was after there and why a hacker drama wanted him for its first hour.
The American studio work has been less happy. Most critics found Flatliners (2017) formulaic, and it is the film that fits least well with anything he has said about himself. He is better when he works from real events and from what he knows, which is what he went home to do: Daniel (2019), and then Rose (2022), which he wrote as well as directed, from personal material, and which finds room for humour in a hard subject. We have not written about either at length, so we will only note that the pattern is consistent.
Going back to the Mr. Robot pilot after sitting through the slack middle of the second series, we felt something close to relief: a man, a room, a voice telling us only what we could not already see, and a director with no need to be noticed. That is a rarer skill than it sounds. Television pilots are usually the loudest episode, because they have to sell the rest; Oplev made his the quietest, and the show was steadier for it.
The shape of the career is settled by now. Hollywood rings when it wants a first hour that will hold; Denmark is where he goes when he has something of his own to say. We would like, once, to see him bring the second to the first.
Biography
Niels Arden Oplev is a Danish film and television director and screenwriter. He was born on 26 March 1961 in Oue, Denmark, and graduated from the National Film School of Denmark in 1989.
Oplev began his career directing Danish television series and feature films, including Portland (1996), We Shall Overcome (2006) and Worlds Apart (2008). He achieved international recognition with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009).
He has since directed episodes of American series such as the pilot of Under the Dome (2013) and the pilot of Mr. Robot (2015), as well as feature films including Dead Man Down (2013) and Flatliners (2017).
