She builds small, exact stop-motion worlds, dresses animals in clothes, and uses the sweetness to smuggle in dread about rent, work and the housing market. Her segment of The House shows the method working; what she has not yet made is anything long.
Fi1m perspective
A rat in a suit stands in a fitted kitchen he cannot afford and cannot stop stroking the worktop. That is the middle story of The House (2022), the stop-motion anthology for which Niki Lindroth von Bahr directed one of three segments, and it is the funniest of them. Jarvis Cocker voices the developer as a man whose sales patter will not switch off, and Sven Wollter and Yvonne Lombard voice a pair of buyers who arrive at the viewing, say almost nothing and do not leave. There is a dance number. Barney Pilling cuts it on the reaction, as comedy should be cut, and the segment has a cleaner shape than either of the stories around it.
It is also the only piece of hers most people will have seen, because the rest of her work is short. She came out of prop-making and scenography, which explains a good deal: her sets and puppets are made by hand with a fussiness about detail that makes a tiled pool or a laminate floor look like somewhere you have been. Tord and Tord (2010) set out the method, animals in clothes in miniature rooms. Bath House (2014) put recently extinct species in a decaying public pool. The Burden (2017) is a musical about low-paid work and dread, and Something to Remember (2019), which she also shot, carries on the singing. Hans Appelqvist has written the music for three of her films, and the trick each time is that the tune is cheerier than the picture.
She has said herself that it is a matter of putting 'a silly, cute filter' on top of stories that are often dark and unpleasant, and she begins with a place rather than a person: a half-done renovation, a shopping centre, an airport. The place does the worrying. In The House the viewing day is a farce, and we laughed at the beetles in the oven, and then the two silent buyers settled in and we found the laugh had gone somewhere cold, because the joke had become the thing the rat was afraid of. When it works, the dread and the comedy arrive together.
What she has not shown is whether the idea can carry more than a short. Our view of The House was that her segment's idea was thinner than the first story's: better shaped, with less underneath. Stop-motion at this finish is slow, years for a few minutes, so her reputation rests on a handful of shorts and one segment, written with Johannes Nyholm. The End (2026), set in an airport and concerned with death, and The Rose, now in production, are shorts again. Nobody should hurry her. But the next question is whether the rat can hold a house for ninety minutes, and she has not yet tried to find out.
Biography
Niki Lindroth von Bahr is a Swedish director, animator and artist based in Stockholm. Born in 1984, she is known for her stop-motion short films and her contribution to the Netflix anthology The House (2022), on which she is credited as director and story writer for one segment.
She received a master's degree in fine arts from the Royal Institute of Art in 2016. Her earlier short films include Tord and Tord (2010), Bath House (2014), The Burden (2017) and Something to Remember (2019). These have screened at festivals including Cannes, Berlinale, Toronto and Sundance, with The Burden winning numerous awards such as the Cristal for Best Short Film at Annecy and a Guldbagge.
Lindroth von Bahr is also a costume designer whose clients have included Fever Ray and David Bowie. She has been represented as a director by Nexus Studios in London and has been a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences since 2020.
