Baran bo Odar

Controlling the climate in suspense

Baran bo Odar was born in Olten, Switzerland, in 1978. His father worked for a chemical company, and that childhood of constant moves ended up shaping a chilly take on suspense storytelling. He studied directing at the University of Television and Film Munich, where he met Jantje Friese, his partner and the screenwriter with whom he has co-written almost all of his scripts.

In 2010, he directed The Silence. European critics noticed his ability to capture emptiness and silence against suffocating rural landscapes. It was his calling card outside Germany.

And the industry was quick to react.

In 2014, he released Who Am I. This film about hackers caught the attention of major Los Angeles studios thanks to its frenetic pace and gritty visual style. But his experience within the American studio system did not turn out the way he had hoped.

His American misstep and retreat into algorithms

In 2017, he shot Sleepless in the United States, starring Jamie Foxx. The film was a studio assignment that barely grossed 30 million dollars worldwide. Critics tore it apart as a generic thriller lacking the personality Odar had shown in his earlier work.

That commercial failure brought him right back to Europe.

But Netflix offered him an exclusive deal to develop the platform's first original German series. In 2017, he premiered Dark. The project became a global cult phenomenon thanks to its time-travel structure and a sound design that created a constant, physical sense of tension for the viewer.

Odar directed every one of the series' 26 episodes. That's unusual in modern television, where several directors often rotate through a single season. He managed to maintain complete visual unity throughout the three years of production.

And success gave him the freedom to take bigger risks.

The scale of the Volume and the future in comics

In 2022, he premiered 1899. It was one of Europe's most ambitious productions, because it was shot entirely on a 360-degree virtual set known as the Volume. The series used video game engine technology to render backgrounds in real time while the actors performed.

Despite the high expectations, Netflix canceled the series after just one season in January 2023. The cost per episode was too high for the audience retention figures the platform recorded in its first few weeks.

Odar didn't stop after the cancellation. In 2024, development began on the adaptation of James Tynion IV's comic Something is Killing the Children. The production deal with Netflix remains in place, with a figure that exceeds $50 million in initial investment.

Filming for this new series is scheduled to use virtual production technology again, at the Babelsberg Studios in Berlin.