Hilma af Klint, now regarded as one of the earliest exponents of abstract art, was little-known during her life. This was partly at her own choosing. She never exhibited her abstract pieces and stipulated that a period of 20 years elapse after her death in 1944 before they could be shown. Lasse Hallström‘s biopic of this fascinating woman is a whistle-stop tour of a complex person who has only recently begun to be recognised as the innovator she was. However, it falls too-often into the cosy tropes of the biographical film, despite spirited central performances, and an attempt to add some impressionistic artistic flourishes to the storytelling.

Hilma charts the life of the artist (played persuasively by Lasse’s daughter Tora Hallström in her younger years, and her real-life mother Lena Olin later) from the death of her beloved younger sister to her old age, and her posthumous legacy. The loss of her sister is the catalyst for a lifelong absorption in esoteric spiritual ideas, particularly the Theosophy of Helena Blavatsky. Through her association with a group of likeminded female artists known as ‘The Five’, she develops her startling artistic technique, which she sees as the visual representation of her religious and philosophical ideas. Of course, even among those who shared her interests, the radical nature of her art marks her as an outsider; a label that would never leave her.

The scenes with The Five are easily the most interesting. Apart from the various seances and other ritual practices, there is also a knotty, shifting power dynamic at work. Chief among Hilma’s relationships in the group is with Anna Cassel (Catherine Chalk), with whom Hilma forges a (possibly fictional) lesbian partnership. Hallström portrays the pair as a genuine kinship on rocky class-based grounds, with the aristocratic but impoverished Hilma relying on the patronage of more the nouveau-but-very-riche Cassel. It is during this period that Hallström’s usually stolid approach relaxes and he attempts to get across Hilma’s sense of transcendental wonder with her paintings incorporated through animation into the depiction of her working. These are rather compelling, as are Hilma’s painterly superimposition into colourised Stockholm street scenes that are utilised as narrative connective tissue. However, there’s no doubt expressed by the creative team about Hilma’s spiritual gift as evidenced in these colourful montages. Given the, to be kind, dubious efficacy of Blavatsky’s teachings, it seems like an oversight that no investigative prodding into this most integral element of the film’s subject ever takes place.

Given the scope of the narrative – an entire life and beyond – too much of the remainder of the film shares the fate of too many portrayals of trailblazing women: masculine condescension, contemporary dismissal and outright hostility, and familial ructions, while hurtling through the elements that made Hilma stand out as an artist and a person. It’s a shame that such a unique subject ends up with a relatively sugary, studiedly benign depiction. Even Hilma’s old-age isolation and implied infirmity is prettified by the appearance of her sister as a consumptive guardian angel. Hallström seems actively at odds with the portrayal by his wife and daughter – who both exemplify Hilma’s determined eccentricity in their own way – by sanding away the edges of the story to a feel-good celebration of creatively. Along with the decision to film in English rather than Swedish, it points to a project that is compromised in a way that its subject never was.

At selected cinemas from Fri 28 Oct 2022