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. The eight-episode Norwegian series confirmed Lumer-Klabbers, after the success of his earlier short-form work, as one of the most distinctive voices in Nordic genre television. The series also extended the central acting careers of Eili Harboe (previously the lead in Thelma) and the rapidly rising Ingrid Unnur Giæver.

In a near-future Oslo, the city's housing crisis has been solved by a major real-estate group whose new apartment blocks bundle every life-support function — water, ventilation, even sleep — into the lease itself. Tenants live more efficiently and cheaply than ever before, but their daily existence is now operationally controlled by the building. Eili Harboe plays a thirty-year-old architect newly hired by the company who slowly comes to understand what her firm has actually built, and whose attempts to surface the situation pit her against her own employer, her partner, and the political establishment that depends on the model continuing.

The series operates as a slow-burn dystopian thriller in the lineage of Black Mirror and Severance but with a distinctively Scandinavian commitment to architectural specificity and design-critique register. The production design — actual purpose-built sets at Filmparken — produced one of the most credible near-future urban environments seen in recent European prestige television.