Helen Archer | On 26, Sep 2023

This rather baffling documentary – half caper, half would-be character study – looks at Pål Enger, the titular Man who stole Edvard Munch’s Scream painting from Oslo’s National Gallery in 1994. A talented and promising footballer in his youth, his real passion was crime – he declares himself “the best criminal in Norway” – who, thanks to his obsession with The Scream specifically, ditched the football pitch for the lure of criminality and graduated from petty theft to high-profile art theft.

“I always liked attention,” he says early on in the film, and it’s clear that that not much has changed. Given free rein to self-mythologise by directors Sunshine Jackson and Nigel Levy, he boasts of the jewellery store and ATM robberies he undertook before becoming fixated with The Scream. The 1994 heist was, in fact, his second attempt at stealing the iconic painting – one which represents, to him, the anxiety and fear of growing up with an abusive stepfather. His first theft from the gallery, in 1988, went well, except for the fact that he stole the wrong painting – Munch’s Love and Pain – on account of miscalculating its position in the gallery and breaking in through the wrong window. For that, he got four years in prison, where he finely tuned his plan to steal The Scream.

On the night of the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics, when the police force would be otherwise engaged, and The Scream – the pride and joy of the gallery – was newly hung in an even more accessible hallway, Enger took his chance and his accomplice successfully nabbed the painting. The documentary-makers break up his straight-to-camera monologue with contributions from art curators, as well as the team involved in investigating (and ultimately recovering) the painting from Enger and his former best friend and long-term accomplice, Bjorn Grytda.

They all seem rather pleased with themselves, as they tell the tale of how a Scotland Yard undercover investigator posed as an art dealer from the Getty in LA to trick Enger into selling the painting. It’s a rather confusing narrative that ends as Enger recounts the day of his arrest, which he knew was coming yet decided to take his newborn baby with him for the occasion, hoist to his waist and just above the loaded gun he had stuffed in his belt. Thankfully the arrest went without mishap, but it does rather cast something of a less-than-heroic pall over procedings. One wonders what his wife thought of it all – but, like Bjorn, she does not take part in the documentary. And this is where the film’s failings become ever more apparent. Enger’s narrative is unchallenged, and there is little in the way of nuance with regard to his actions – just some self-satisfied men talking about how they all “outsmarted” each other.

The voices missing in the film are palpable, allowing Enger to present as a loveable rogue. Without Bjorn’s input – and it is clear a large part of the story is untold, their falling out remaining opaque, even as Enger mourns the end of their friendship – it is impossible for the viewer to unpick the truth of the situation. Instead, Enger is able – encouraged, even – to present the story of his life that he tells himself, which may in fact be far from the reality of those who knew and loved him. It is a film in thrall to its subject, less interested in objectivity than it is in aggrandisement, and all the worse for it.

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