Susanne Bier gives actors time to show what their characters are trying to conceal. We rate her for the performances and suspense, though her plotting can be easier to anticipate than we would like.
Fi1m perspective
Tom Hiddleston's Jonathan Pine keeps his reactions private in The Night Manager (2016), and Susanne Bier gives us time to notice the effort. We enjoyed watching him and Hugh Laurie assess one another because she makes their guarded responses worth attending to. This is assured, pleasurable spy television, and it shows how well she can direct actors without encouraging them to advertise every thought. The familiar plotting is a limitation, but it does not spoil the evening.
Her Danish films reached a broad audience with the romantic comedy The One and Only (1999), before the Dogme film Open Hearts (2002) brought international attention. After the Wedding (2006) and In a Better World (2010) continued her interest in family ties and difficult moral choices. Faces and eyes matter in this cinema because they show what those choices cost. Her recurring collaborators include writer Anders Thomas Jensen and cinematographer Morten Søborg. She keeps coming back to families whose ordinary lives have been abruptly overturned.
In The Night Manager, David Farr's adaptation of John le Carré gives her clever people to set against one another. Michael Snyman's cinematography makes Roper's surroundings inviting, while Tom Burton's production design gives his wealth the comfort of long familiarity. Bier lets us enjoy looking at it. That matters: Roper's life has to look desirable if the ease with which people tolerate him is to be convincing. She also keeps the actors' watchfulness legible within those rooms, rather than allowing the furnishings to become the main attraction.
Her English-language films have been less dependable, with Serena (2014) troubled by implausibility and uneven tone. The Night Manager marked a more successful turn towards television, while Bird Box (2018) carried her interest in psychological suspense into a mainstream thriller. The recurring risk is that her plots can seem too carefully arranged, so we notice the next complication being prepared. Even The Night Manager makes less of its moral complications than we would like. Start there for Hiddleston and Laurie, rather than for any great surprise in the spy machinery.
Biography
Susanne Bier is a Danish film and television director. She was born on 15 April 1960 in Copenhagen.
Bier made her feature debut with Freud's Leaving Home (1991). Her subsequent films include Open Hearts (2002), Brothers (2004), After the Wedding (2006) and In a Better World (2010), the last of which won the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film. She has also directed English-language features such as Things We Lost in the Fire (2007), Love Is All You Need (2012), Serena (2014) and Bird Box (2018).
On television, Bier directed the miniseries The Night Manager (2016), for which she received a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Directing for a Limited Series, Movie or Dramatic Special. She later directed The Undoing (2020), The First Lady (2022) and The Perfect Couple (2024).
