The Architect

Kerren Lumer-Klabbers's The Architect (Arkitekten) premiered in the Berlinale Series strand at the Berlin Film Festival in 2023 and received a Special Mention. Following well-received short-form work, the eight-episode Norwegian series marked Lumer-Klabbers out as one of the most distinctive voices in Nordic genre television. It also gave substantial roles to Eili Harboe, previously the lead in Thelma, and to the fast-rising Ingrid Unnur Giæver.

In a near-future Oslo, a major real-estate group has solved the city's housing crisis with apartment blocks that bundle every life-support function (water, ventilation, even sleep) into the lease itself. Tenants live more efficiently and cheaply than ever before, but the building now runs their daily existence. Eili Harboe plays a thirty-year-old architect newly hired by the company, and the series picks her up just as she starts to look properly at what her employer has built and at who depends on the model continuing.

It plays as a slow-burn dystopian thriller in the line of Black Mirror and Severance, with a Scandinavian attention to architecture and a design critic's eye for how buildings shape the people inside them. The production design, built as real purpose-made sets at Filmparken, gives it one of the most credible near-future cities in recent European prestige television. The satire is dry, and much of the unease comes from how reasonable the system looks on paper.