Three Films Make A Post: Let them try

They Will Kill You (2026): On one hand, I admire Kirill Sokolov’s movie for how full on in its worship for certain aspects of Quentin Tarantino’s body of work it is, and how quickly it becomes trashy, intense and in your face. On the other hand, as it can go with a film that basically shouts in a viewer’s face for ninety minutes, this approach can become a bit tiresome, and I found myself wishing for a change of tack and tone, at least for a scene or two.

Two things, though: Zazie Beetz needs to team up with Samara Weaving in the inevitable Ready Or Not 3, and Pig Satan needs to become a thing in the wider world.

Kraken (2026): Sure, sure, sure, veteran Norwegian horror director Pål Øie’s eco horror/giant monster movie does nothing really new or special with the tropes of the genre it works with. But for my tastes, it absolutely makes up for that with the focussed, unironic approach it takes to these tropes and its unfussy pacing. Let’s call it clarity of purpose.

While this is certainly no comedy, it does recommend itself further with a nicely dry sense of humour and puts enough effort into character building and relations I rather enjoyed my time with them, as well as the film itself. Plus, what’s not to like about a Kraken and the icky things that live on it?

True Fear (2024): Staying in Scandinavia but moving over to Sweden, this is a YouTuber POV horror movie about a couple of young women (Ava Nikodell and Rebecka Enholm) following the trail of the worst witch hunt in Swedish history and encountering creepy rural people, toxic masculinity and the only thing better than duelling banjos: duelling supernatural forces.

Director Daniel di Grado doesn’t attempt to re-invent the found footage wheel here, but like Kraken, this is a film working with tropes sure-handedly, while again having better than average character work, with a script (by Ida Kjellin) that even adds – very appropriately, given the witch hunt theme – some feminist elements.

POV horror veterans like me can actually look forward to some proper special effects here, as well as shot construction that’s thought through beyond “let’s wave the camera around” and s narrative that doesn’t waste hours on characters making themselves unlikable via endless dicking around.

If that sounds like faint praise, it isn’t – this is a rather enjoyable small film.

Three Films Make A Post: Never bring a knife salesman to a gunfight.

Invoking Yell (2023): The late 1990s. A trio of women make their way to a supposedly haunted far-off forest site to shoot material for a video for their black metal band. For one of them, bringing the camera, it’s also supposed to be some kind of initiation into the kvlt.

Despite some pacing issues, this Chilean POV horror movie by Patricio Valladares isn’t a bad little example of the form at all. The 90s would-be black metal church burners mood is pretty believable, and once things get going, the filmmakers demonstrate a nice eye for making the traditional running through the woods interesting again.

The Last Stop in Yuma County (2023): A couple of decades ago, I’d have yawned and called this tale of a varied group of people threatening each other with violence in the last diner stop in Yuma County yet another Tarantino-alike. Of course, for better or worse, QT couldn’t make a movie as concise and focussed as Francis Galluppi’s debut feature to save his life, and once you’ve gotten over the shock of this being something of a throwback to 90s filmmaking, you might very well appreciate that, as well as the control about rhythm and shape of the film Galluppi shows.

With a cast featuring the kind of indie darlings I like – particularly Jim Cummings, Jocelin Donahue as well as some beloved horror people like Barbara Crampton and Alex Essoe in very minor roles – and filmmaking this controlled, this actually turned out be a very pleasant surprise.

Bells in the Moonlight aka Klokker I måneskinn (1964): Kåre Bergstrøm’s anthology movie about a group of mostly men telling each other three tales of the supernatural that are then debunked by a fat Freudian unfortunately isn’t as great as the director’s Lake of the Dead. It is very well shot and expertly staged, and there are quite a few eerie little moments here, but the tales themselves are harmless and gutless, have a tendency to moralize – the adultery-destroying elf doll is particularly painful – and go on much longer than their thin plots allow.

My general dislike for tales of the supernatural that never actually commit to the supernatural and make a big thing out of their not committing to either the supernatural or the rational certainly doesn’t help matters here, but even without it, this is mostly one for the completist who needs to have seen every horror anthology. A group that, alas, includes me.

Three Films Make A Post: There will be no leftovers.

Thanksgiving (2023): This is probably Eli Roth’s best horror film – I haven’t seen his kids movies, so I can’t speak to that very different part of the man’s career. But then, this really isn’t saying much, given the things he has inflicted on us, and consequently, Thanksgiving is not much of a movie. It really, really wants to be a knowing modern version of the nastiest kind of grindhouse slasher, but apart from the misanthropy, it never gets at the specific charms of these films. And the “knowing” part mostly consists of the kind of jokes Roth finds clever, and which thusly isn’t.

Otherwise, this is just a boring mediocrity lacking in suspense, mood, characters, or even enough cleverness to understand that this specific filmmaker simply doesn’t have the abilities to make a decent whodunnit slasher.

There’s Something in the Barn (2023): The astonishing thing about Magnus Martens’s horror comedy is how by the numbers and utterly predictable in every detail it is despite concerning the Christmas fight between an American family and Norwegian barn elves, which is not something I’d call by the numbers or ordinary.

There’s not a single plot point, nor development, not a single damn joke that isn’t so obvious you’ll make it yourself a second before the movie gets around to it. It’s mind-boggling how obvious this thing truly is in every aspect of its script, and truly astonishing that nobody involved in the production seems to have had a single even half-original idea once the barn elves were scribbled onto a napkin. This makes Roth’s film look like a work of deep creativity and intelligence, which it isn’t.

Death Forest aka Desu foresuto kyoufu no mori (2014): So it is left to this unassuming little Japanese movie to save this triple post. Not by being terribly original either – though it certainly beats the other two movies by the sheer power of possibly having had at least an hour or two of thought invested in it, and by not hiding behind the “comedy” label. The characters are cardboard, the structure pretty old hat, but then, there’s really not much you can squeeze into an hour of runtime. What makes Death Forest and its tale of various characters stumbling through a, wait for it, deadly spooky forest, fun are some pleasantly creepy and disturbing monsters that carry the genuine weirdness of the dark side of much of Japanese folklore. Which is more than enough for a direct-to-home-video movie based on a web game.

There aren’t too many movies whose characters find their end getting their upper bodies chomped off by a creepy, cheaply digital, flying head, at least.

Three Films Make A Post: Human blood is only the beginning…

Detour aka Snarveien (2009): A Norwegian couple on a booze run in weird and peculiar Sweden (gasp!) end up stranded in a forest, encountering one strange situation after the next. Violent men in gimp suits, a disturbing backwoods family and a cop of dubious trustworthiness are only parts of a very bad night.

Severin Eskeland’s shortish horror-leaning thriller is pretty silly and improbable in its set-up, and obvious in many of its twists. Yet it is also well-directed and effectively paced, and dominated by a handful of very solidly structured and shot suspense scenes, as well as helped along by quite a few fun performances. That’s more than enough to make for a pleasant time of thrills and a bit of violence.

Vampire Virus (2020): This entry into the ever-growing filmography of the apparently indefatigable Charlie Steeds mixes elements of the Lesbian Vampire film with very 80s horror lighting (and a perfectly fitting synth score by Matt Akers), a bit of a male gay romance, some subtext about vampirism as a metaphor for all kinds of societal outsiders, and a bit of blood and gloop. All the while, it keeps to a handful of locations and sets – as typical for Steeds, all looking better than you’d expect or fear, which also always goes for his filmmaking – and has one eye pointed in the direction of proper low budget cheesiness.

It’s pretty great for what it is, even though you won’t confuse Steeds with Rollin, Larraz or Franco.

Impulse (1984): After a pretty shocking call from her mother during which the good lady first berates her and then shoots herself, Jennifer (Meg Tilly) and her boyfriends Stuart (Tim Matheson) return to her small town home. There’s something not at all right in the place: her family – played by people like John Karlen and Bill Paxton – and the rest of the population act very strangely indeed. It seems as if they have lost some of their impulse control, doing whatever comes to mind, whenever they please.

Director Graham Baker portrays the ensuing chaos with a nice eye for the creepy in the familiar and some suspenseful set pieces. There’s a feeling of creeping dread running especially through those parts of the film during which little happens on a surface level.

The film also looks fantastic in a very specific early 80s way that would be lost to films just a year or two later. The only real minus is the conspiracist coda that adds little to the film at hand.

In short: Troll (2022)

A publicly not exactly lauded attempt to build a tunnel through the Dovrefjell mountain range in Norway awakens a kaiju-sized troll. The thing turns out to be rather unhappy with certain elements of Norway’s secret history and goes on a bit of a rampage that will eventually lead it to Oslo.

The authorities are not especially effective fighting a giant menace that seems immune to modern weapons. Only palaeontologist Nora Tidemann (Ine Marie Wilmann), who grew up with a father (Gard B. Eidsvold) obsessed with the hidden truth of troll lore, is willing to think outside of the box. She acquires her own mini-coterie of nerds – her father, assistant to the prime minister Andreas Isaksen (Kim Falck), Isaksen’s techie friend Sigrid (Karoline Viktoria Sletteng Garvang, owner of what I imagine to be a very exhausting name even for Norwegian names), and special forces captain Kristoffer Holm (Mads Sjøgård Pettersen) – and just might be her country’s only chance against the troll and the experimental weaponry of the mad minister of defence (Fridtjov Såheim).

I actually love parts of the world building of Roar Uthaug’s Troll, the way it creates a space where the international language of kaiju movie tropes can be read through the lens of the Norwegian local, folklore and cultural specificities.

Unfortunately, once it leaves the conceptual level, Troll’s script (by Espen Aukan) fails on nearly every conceivable level and plays out like a particularly lazily written pre-Sharknado SyFy Original with a bit of a budget but little idea of what to do with it.

Characters aren’t just one-dimensional tropes, something I’d be totally fine in a giant monster movie, but the blandest version of them, spouting ill-timed one-liners and tumbling awkwardly into emotional beats the script doesn’t put even the tiniest amount of work into preparing. The plot doesn’t actually feel like any such thing but a string of beats cribbed from other giant monster movies strung together with little thought about how they actually hang together. The writing lets Jun Fukuda era Toho kaijus look like Shakespeare, or really, like films crafted by actual professionals with a bit of self-regard. There’s nothing wrong with underwriting the humans in a monster movie; there’s a lot wrong with underwriting them so badly they get in the way of a viewer having fun with the monsters.

Andin the way the shoddy plotting of the affair and its non-characters truly get, always adding at least an element of irritation to what should be perfectly fine giant monster action and actually perfectly fun giant monster mythology.

Three Films Make A Post: The scene was the wildest freak-out in Vegas history…and the gig was to grab it all!

The Innocents aka De uskyldige (2021): Eskil Vogt’s horror movie about a group of kids who discover they are developing psychic powers and the pretty horrible things that follow is certainly a future genre classic, exploring uncomfortable ideas about childhood and poverty without becoming dishonest or grimdark or lacking compassion, while also providing some memorable and painfully effective horror set pieces that make most jump scare horror look embarrassing and pointless in comparison.

There’s also fantastic child acting, as well as filmmaking that finds un-kitschy ways to portray the way a child’s sense perceptions might feel when combined with the strangeness of telepathic and telekinetic powers taken seriously.

The Adventures of Arsène Lupin aka Les aventures d’Arsène Lupin (1957): I generally do tend to enjoy French genre movies made in this period, but Jacques Becker’s attempt at everyone’s favourite gentleman thief feels rather too close to the way German filmmakers of the time would have handled the material, which might have something to do with this being a French-German-Italian co-production. So expect only the most obvious kind of humour, a never-ending stint in the world of KuK (treated nostalgically, of course and alas). Not to blame on my native country are Robert Lamoureux’s one-note performance as Lupin, or the script’s difficulties when it comes to at least pretending its plot episodes are actually connected. And it’s not as if the film had any interesting heist set pieces.

The Came to Rob Las Vegas (1968): A criminal mastermind (Gary Lockwood) bites off more than he can chew in a daring (and murderous) armoured truck robbery (not really robbing Las Vegas, despite the film’s title), and soon has to cope not just with the normal police and the owner of the truck (Lee J. Cobb), but also the Mafia, the US treasury department (via Jack Palance), and the fact that his merry band of colleagues is mostly incapable of keeping a clear head or following instructions. At least there’s a particularly attractive Elke Sommer waiting for him, or might that be another problem?

This is another international co-production, with the late-60s cast to match, competently though not exceedingly well directed by Antonio Isasi-Isasmendi. If it were twenty minutes shorter, this would probably be a great example of the twisty, hard-boiled arm of the heist movie. With over two hours of running time, it does tend to drag its feet from time to time, taking its time with various subplots it doesn’t exactly need. On the other hand, there are some really cleverly staged set pieces taking place in the desert, and a great ending where everybody loses.

In short: The Trip (2021)

Original title: I onde dager

The married couple of unsuccessful actress Lisa (Noomi Rapace) and soap opera director Lars (Aksel Hennie) head into a cabin by the fjords owned by Lars’s father for a quiet and peaceful weekend. Nominally, this is, for in truth, both are planning to murder the other there. Fortunately, for friends of true love finding a way and such, before anyone can murder anyone else, the perhaps not quite so happy couple are visited by a trio of very violent criminals (as played by Atle Antonsen, Christian Rubeck and André Eriksen), whose various attempts at rape and murder might be just the thing so save a marriage.

I’m pretty sure there will be quite a few people who can’t stomach Tommy Wirkola’s very specific mix of 70s exploitation style home invasion horror (the only good kind of home invasion horror) and darkest comedy; it takes a very specific kind of constitution to allow a film that can get quite as nasty as this one to also be funny. Despite my love for the more unpleasant side of traditional exploitation, I often tend have problems when it is mixed with humour myself, mostly because humour often seems to cheapen the harsher elements of a film or because some things just aren’t funny.

For my tastes, Wirkola (who does of course historically have a bit of talent for his sort of thing, see Red Snow) manages the difficult task of deciding what to keep simply unpleasant, which unpleasantness can be made funny, and which simply not to touch very well indeed, knowing what kind of brutality can actually make for a good, cynical joke, and which one would be tacky to use that way.

It does of course help there, too, that Wirkola is as experienced with comical timing as well as the sort of timing needed in an ultra-violent thriller as he is. An experience that also clearly makes it easier for the guy to find the points in his tale of marriage-saving blood and guts where he can quietly push the absurdity of things so far, he’s also at least partially satirizing exactly the kind of film he is making.

Add to that a cast of actors who seem fully in on the joke and just as capable to shift codes as Wirkola is, and the resulting film is a whole lot of decidedly non-stupid fun.

Three Films Make A Post: Money, Madness, Murder.

The Haunting of Sarah Hardy (1989): If you’re in the right mood, this thriller by Jerry London produced for the USA Network featuring Sela Ward, Morgan Fairchild and Polly Bergen recommends itself by a particularly preposterous plot construction. At first, it’s very much gaslighting business by the numbers, but soon enough, the film spends time in James M. Cain land and even does some reverse gaslighting (something too few films do) eventually. If only London’s direction had more of a zing to it, this would probably be either a perfect example of the virtues overwriting can sometimes achieve or a camp masterpiece (if only I liked camp). As it stands, it’s at least less boring a film than it at first appears.

Mortal aka Torden (2020): I’m a big admirer of the films of André Øvredal, but this mix of superhero tropes, vague attempts at religious parable, myth and Brightburn just doesn’t work at all, its different elements never really coming together into a whole once the film starts giving answers to the questions it has come up with in the first act. On the plot level, there’s simply too little of interest happening, Øvredal going through motions of high budget thrill rides instead of actually making a thrilling film, while the film’s more thoughtful elements never really go anywhere. It’s rather poignant that the characters read up on Thor in a children’s book.

Visually, it’s very pretty indeed, but the pacing is much too ponderous for a film with so few actual thoughts, the characters have little to grab one – there’s just a feeling of something important that would make this into an actual film having gone missing somewhere during the production. Worst is an ending that attempts to be a classic 70s downer, but only feels deeply dissatisfying on a narrative level as well as  disconnected to any of the thematic questions the film might have had.

Local Hero (1983): I’ve taken a decade or two of coming around to the charms and qualities of Bill Forsyth’s much loved comedy. It’s not an obvious film to gather as much love as it has, with its nearly complete abandonment of the fish out of water plot after its first act or so, an approach to characters that can feel distant when you haven’t quite understood how subtle and empathetic it rather is, and a sense of humour that’s often plain peculiar.
The picture postcard beautiful shots of Scotland are an obvious attraction, but what really makes this for me is the willingness to meet characters on their own terms, understanding that the good and the bad in people are inextricably intertwined and even (not a thing anyone seems to be willing in the here and now) suggests that you might get along with people who aren’t perfect embodiments of what you want them to be, quietly praising individuality and finding it in everyone.


It’s also a film willing to present and accept a non-perfect solution to character arcs, as well as its so-called plot. And life, one assumes.

Three Films Make A Post: In the darkest hour, there is a light that shines on every human being...but ONE!

Rottentail (2018): As if anyone needed another example that going for the Instant Cult Movie thing is a very bad idea, here comes director Brian Skiba’s idiotic tale (apparently based on a graphic novel, for which I’ll just take the movie’s word) of a scientist (Corin Nemec at a career low) who turns into a human-rabbit monster thing after an unfortunate incident involving a genetically modified killer rabbit and an experimental fertility treatment. From then on out, it’s shrill acting, unfunny on purpose “funny” lines (because actual jokes are too hard, I can’t help but assume), hideous special effects, direction exclusively consisting of annoying tics, and winking at the camera non-stop, with nothing that suggests the point from where actual cult movies start: the wish to make an actual movie.

Darkman (1990): The film that looks now a bit like Sam Raimi’s weird dry-run for making his Spider-Man movies on the other hand, is an actual cult film, made by people who obviously care about the art of filmmaking even in the film’s strangest moments – perhaps even most then – with grace, style, cleverness and an actual sense of humour. Typical of Raimi at the time, the film’s a rollercoaster with at least one fun/clever/wonderful/crazy idea jumping onto the screen every thirty seconds, but also with enough of a heart and a brain to keep the tale about what amounts to the Phantom of the Opera as a superhero film just barely under control. Watching it for the twentieth time or so, I still had the feeling of seeing a film that just might go completely off the rails any second now, but never does, instead leaving me happily grinning for much of its running time, when not gasping at Liam Neeson’s huge hands (well, or his wondrous ability to play his role just as straight as it can be played) or Larry Drake’s gorgeous mugging.


Thelma (2017): Completely different in style and tone, but also rather wonderful, is Joachim Trier’s meticulous film about the kind of teenage lesbian awakening that includes psychokinetic powers that start with Carrie but end in the freedom of positive and hard-earned wish fulfilment. It’s filmed with a sense of poetry, of terror and at some points of an awe that raises this far above many a film that uses the supernatural as metaphor, and played by Eili Harboe with immense emotional weight and subtlety. All of this puts it far beyond the modernized re-tread of Carrie it at first threatens to be; it also should convince every feeling viewer that its happy end is perfectly deserved and proper for what came before it. Depending on one’s interpretation of what happened before, one might not even want to treat the happy end as one, but the film’s perfectly fine with not only portraying the suffering and crisis of becoming herself of a young woman but also daring to say that things might actually get better for her.

Heavy Trip (2018)

Orginal title: Hevi reissu

Friends Turo (Johannes Holopainen), Jynkky (Antti Heikkinen), Pasi (Max Ovaska) and Lotvonen (Samuli Jaskio) live in a small Finnish village whose only claim to fame seems to be reindeer farming (ranching?). The only thing that’s breaking up the boredom is the guys’ shared love for metal. They’ve been a practicing death metal act for a good twelve years now, as a matter of fact. You need to take that practicing part literally, by the way, for the band has never had a gig, does not have a single self-written song in their repertoire, goes without a name, and has only ever played in the basement of the farm of Lotvonen’s parents. But things start to change: dreaming of fame, fortune, and the heart of local flower shop gal Miia (Minka Kuustonen) motivates Turo to really get serious about the whole being a band thing. Why, they even manage write their first own song.

Things become intense when a guy (Rune Temte) running a Norwegian metal festival comes to the farm to buy reindeer blood, as you do. After accidentally dousing him in blood, they give him their demo tape. Clearly, they are a shoe-in for the festival! Once Turo uses the fantasy gig to show off to Miia, the whole village that formerly treated them as shitty dudes with too long hair is cheering them on. So it is rather unfortunate there’s actually no space for them at the festival. But as you know, crazy dreams can come true in the world of metal. Insert devil horns here.

What you really don’t expect going into a film about a Finnish backwoods death metal band is to encounter something as sweet and heart-warming as this one turns out to be. Juuso Laatio and Jukka Vidgren’s movie really doesn’t have a nasty bone in its body, treating characters like its protagonists whom most films would play as sad sacks to laugh about as incredibly nice, if perfectly weird, young men you can’t help but root for in any crisis. Even Turo’s nemesis, the sleazy lounge singer and used car salesman Jouni Tulkku (Ville Tiihonen) is only treated with mild derision, a reaction that actually fits his character’s failings more than going to extremes.

While this is a film about music very often all about burning the world down and dancing in the ruins, it does understand that it, as well as the music is champions, is also about the joy of playacting, of using a pose to become larger-than-life to play music that’s larger than life, too. So our protagonists are, at heart, just really nice guys who want to finally fulfil their dreams and a have a bit of an adventure in the process instead of mythic rock gods. And while all this obviously leads to funny situations for the characters, the film never makes fun of their dreams or their having dreams, presenting itself as a nice antidote to the South Park and Deadpool schools of humour whose makers hate dreams, hopes, and their characters too much to ever make a joke I’d find funny.

And funny Heavy Trip is basically non-stop, with good enough comical timing that even projectile vomiting becomes pretty hilarious. Among other highlights are Pasi’s black metal face paint, which makes him look like the sad clown of metal, the scene where Jouni sells the gang a horrible van by dressing it up as The Van of Death with many murders and accidents connected to it, Turo’s, ahem, encounter with his spirit animal (who, we can assume, is the best at what it does, but what it does isn’t very nice), the acquisition of a replacement drummer by kidnapping of a black Laplander (Chike Ohanwe) from the mental institution where Turo works as a particularly nice nurse (it’s funnier than it sounds, really), and so on and so forth.


It’s a brilliant movie, the sort of comedy you go out of not just having laughed parts of your anatomy off (which is pretty metal, right?), but also with a big smile of actual joy.

North Star (1996)

Nome, Alaska, 1899. When evil mining magnate Sean McLennon (James Caan) isn’t quoting Shakespeare, badly, or babbling the sort of “keep America pure” rhetoric one expects to culminate in him wanting to build a wall around Alaska, he’s doing his best to acquire a monopoly in the local mining business. In a couple of weeks he’s going to dispossess all foreign-born small claim owners, but before that he’s already letting his henchmen Reno (Burt Young) and Smiley (Morten Faldaas) loose to just murder anyone who doesn’t want to sell their claims to him.

One of his prospective victims is half Native American Hudson Saanteek (Christopher “totally Indian” Lambert). In what must have felt like a clever move at the time, Hudson has staked a claim on the holy land of his tribe to keep it out of the hands of prospectors. Alas, this only leads to his grandfather getting shot during his dying ceremony, and Hudson being left for dead by McLennon’s not terribly competent people when they try to murder him.

Hudson’s not going to let this sort of things slide, obviously, but his plan to get to Nome and – one presumes – either unmask McLennon’s evil plans or kill him (the film ain’t telling) somehow ends with him kidnapping McLennon’s girlfriend Sarah (Catherine McCormack) whose main job seems to be to read McLennon to sleep with the works of the Bard. McLennon gets together a small posse, and hunt through the icy wilderness ensues.

The 1990s were, apart from a few exceptions, a very bad decade for the Western, so a British, French, Italian, and Norwegian co-production shot in that snowy twin country of Alaska we know as Norway, directed by a Norwegian with a French actor pretending to be Native American in the lead may even sound like a proposal strange enough to add something to a genre nobody in the 90s had much time for. Particularly when the film in question is directed by Nils Gaup, whose brilliant Pathfinder – not to be confused with the horrid remake that isn’t one – amply demonstrates a sensibility that should work rather well with Western tropes, and most certainly with scenes of people chasing each other through the snow.

Unfortunately, the actual film we got is a complete mess, apparently written by six people, none of whom seems to have had any idea what kind of film they actually wanted to make. So characterisation and motivations shift and twist from scene to scene. One minute, McLennon is a walking-talking criticism of capitalism and racism, the next he’s portrayed as a man with a genuine mental illness, the next he’s a moustache-twirling villain who seems to believe Macbeth is his play’s hero (the last bit played with clear relish by Caan in full scenery-chewing mode); characters are introduced only to then do nothing but hang around in the background of some scenes; Hudson never does anything that makes even a lick of sense; the happy end (“yay, martial law!”, the film cheers) borders on the absurd, and so on and so forth.

Not surprisingly, the pacing is completely off too, with nary a scene that isn’t either too long or too short for what one assumes it is trying to achieve in the plot, if it is trying to achieve anything at all. Things just happen without any palpable thought given to whys and wherefores, as if three or four very different drafts of this thing had just been mashed together by a random intern. It’s rather puzzling, too, for while Norway was probably a cheaper place to shoot in than Alaska, the film clearly wasn’t a seat-of-your-pants production but something made by actual professionals on what must have been a decent budget. It rather feels like a Dino DeLaurentiis production, but Dino was, for once, innocent.

The acting’s all over the place too, which isn’t much of a surprise given the variable characterisation of everyone and everything here. While Caan’s decision to go all out is certainly amusing, it doesn’t help make the film any more coherent either, and though I certainly like Lambert and his minimalist approach to acting, he’s really not the kind of actor able to conjure up an engaging performance out of nothing, which is all the script provides. Young and McCormack are totally wasted here, too.

Particularly puzzling is how little the film shows of Gaup’s talents at snow-bound action; even when it comes to scenes of dog-sleds chasing each other through the ice and snow, the pacing and rhythm of the film is so off, things feel as gripping and dramatic as somebody reading stock market prices aloud.


I have no idea what happened with this production, but the end result is utterly dreadful.

Villmark 2 (2015)

aka Villmark Asylum

A group of workers and one young archivist under the leadership of Live (Ellen Dorrit Petersen) are helicoptered to an empty old sanatorium and asylum deep in the deepest woods of Norway, which is indeed very deep if Norwegian horror films have taught me anything. They have only one weekend – much too short a time frame the oldest and crankiest among their number will not stop to complain until he is killed off (spoilers, I guess) – to mark the place for hazardous materials so that the wrecking crew that’s going to come in can wreck the place responsibly.

However, something’s very wrong at the place. It’s not just that the caretaker of the asylum – who has been living there for decades – doesn’t seem terribly cooperative and is indeed rather creepy, but there are noises and shapes all around that suggest there’s someone (or something?) else living there with him. Given that the team soon finds a man taking his last breaths hung up like a slasher movie victim after some sort of attack, one can’t help but suspect said someone or something is not friendly. So, as if the general tensions between the workers wasn’t enough, they are getting murdered in rather unpleasant ways one by one.

If you want, you can take the hints and Easter eggs in Pål Øie’s Villmark 2, made more than a decade after the film it is a sequel to, add them to the stuff you remember from the first one and come up with a pretty nice retcon of what actually happened in the first one, reassessing who killed whom and why there. Or you can ignore these things and have a perfectly nice asylum-set slasher on your hands. As far as handling the connections between sequels in a series of horror movies goes, that seems to be a rather neat way to go about things, suggesting a mythology more than constructing it. But then, I’m bound to prefer the more ambiguous method for this sort of thing that lets the audience do the work – or really, as much work as one wants to do – and leaves more space for a sequel to be a thing all its own.

Admittedly, “a thing all its own” is a bit of a curious description for Villmark 2, for where the first movie only used elements of the slasher and films about people cracking up in a cabin in the woods, this second outing hews much closer to typical genre standards, and not just because the empty sanatorium and/or asylum might be a place that’s even more overused by horror movies than a cabin in the woods. There are certainly more than just shades of the brilliant Session 9 in the film’s set-up, too, even though it moves in a more standard backwoods slasher direction from there. However, the film’s central location – the interior scenes where apparently shot in Hungary and not in Norway – is still often effectively creepy, Øie again demonstrating quite an ability to fill a place with a feeling of wrongness before much of anything happens.

On the plot side, the film often follows standard backwoods slasher structures, but Øie has a better grip on the possibilities of the formula than most directors still using it, developing  well-worn tropes effectively, as well as simply putting more effort into the characterisation of victims and their tormentors alike.

The film also recommends itself through a pleasant sense of the grotesque. Again, its basic ideas regarding the design and behaviour of the killers and what they do isn’t new, but there’s a sense for the telling detail when it comes to this aspect of the film that turns the things I’ve seen in a hundred movies effective again for this one. They also hang together, aesthetically and thematically, feeling like an organic – if aberrant – consequence of the film’s background.

I very much suspect that the way the film’s backstory taps into World War II and terrible human experiments following it has some strong resonance for a Norwegian audience – at least, it seems to be a motive repeating in what I’ve seen in Norwegian horror. Then again, I might just have seen exactly the films to make me come up with this theory.


Anyway, while I don’t think Villmark 2 is quite as strong as the first film, it is a fine film very much worth watching.

Lake of the Dead (1958)

Original title: De dødes tjern

A group of friends – critic Gabriel Mørk (André Bjerke, the actual writer of the novel this is based on), crime writer Bernhard Borge (Henki Kolstad, playing a character named like the pseudonym Bjerke used for the novel), Borge’s wife Sonja (Bjørg Engh), psychologist Kai Bugge (Erling Lindahl), Liljan Werner (Henny Moan), and her fiancée Harald Gran (Georg Richter) – are making their way out into the boons of Norway to visit Liljan’s brother Bjørn (Per Lillo-Stenberg) in a forest cabin for a couple of weeks of rest and relaxation.

When they arrive, they can’t find Bjørn anywhere in or around the cabin. Some exploration suggests he has jumped into a nearby lake and died. A diary found by Bugge suggests the young man became fixated on a legend surrounding the lake. Apparently, one Tore Gråvik (Leif Sommerstad) first drowned his sister - with whom he was obsessed - and her lover and then himself in it, his ghost supposedly haunting the area ever since, occasionally luring people to a drowning death. The diary purports Bjørn has indeed seen the ghost – or dreamed of it, the borders between sleep and wakefulness having become rather blurry to the young man – and felt compelled to jump into the lake to confront the void; or drown in it.

So, this may be a relatively clear cut case of a mentally fragile man killing himself, as the local police think, but there are things that just don’t quite seem to fit this theory. And is grief the only reason why Liljan now feels the call of the lake too once night falls?

In its native Norway, Kåre Bergstrøm’s Lake of the Dead isn’t just one of the most well-loved horror movies of the country but tends to land very high on critics’ lists of the best Norwegian movie regardless of genre. Outside of the country, film is unfortunately barely known, even though it should at least make any lover of mysteries with fantastical elements, or fantastic cinema as a whole rather happy.

The film’s structure is very much that of a classic mystery, psychologist Bugge – the lead character of several crime novels by Bjerke – taking on the role of the main detective as seen through the eyes of the slightly bumbling Borge, suggesting the human mind is more important for the solving of crimes than physical evidence. Yet instead of using Bugge to expose the supernatural elements of the mystery as pure bogus, the film chooses ambivalence, having a (sort of) rational explanation but also suggesting it might not be the completely right one. One should also keep in mind that the “rational” explanation for some of the film’s occurrences is based on telepathic mind control, not exactly a thing which seems opposed to the sort of thinking that finds explanation in ghosts. This idea does of course also make Bugge something of an occult detective, perhaps not one using an electric pentacle fighting the Abnatural, but certainly not a debunker.

Interestingly enough, Bergstrøm contrasts Bugge’s at least sort of scientific and rational method with the ideas of Mørk, who is convinced of a more supernatural explanation (with a particular tension caused by him being played by the writer of the whole thing), but also with the purely worldly and criminalistic interpretation of the situation by Gran (as well as to a degree the worldly but simply wrong one of the police). The film never quite agrees with anyone completely, leaving the audience in a delicious state of ambivalence even after the narrative has run its course and never falling into the trap of making any of the characters apart from Borge an idiot.

So an entertaining and interesting supernatural (or not) mystery whose style reminds me of the kind of story you might have found in a US pulp like “Unknown” is guaranteed, but Bergstrøm also manages to create more than just a few delightful moments of strangeness and the weird. The scene in which Liljan is nearly sleepwalking into the lake is apparently particularly iconic in Norway – not surprising giving its uncanny mood created by shadows and lights – but my personal favourite is the dream (or is it?) about Bjørn’s encounter with Gråvik’s ghost that creates something very special out of noirish lighting, the claustrophobia of the woods (nature often feeling rather unnatural to us humans), a folkloric undertone, an eye for the telling detail that increases a situation’s creepiness (Gråvik’s wooden leg and the way he moves thanks to it are just brilliant), and a delicate feel of nightmare logic. This scene is exemplary for the film’s greatest strength, the intertwining of the rational and the irrational until it becomes to difficult to discern which is which.


That scenes like it are embedded in an intelligently constructed and well-paced mystery just makes Lake of the Dead all the more stunning. 

In short: Dark Woods (2003)

Original title: Villmark

TV producer Gunnar (Bjørn Floberg) is in the final stages of preparation for a reality TV show that’ll see its victims trying to survive out in the wild wild woods of Norway. Gunnar’s of the opinion that he can’t have the participants of his show do anything he wouldn’t do himself, so he packs up his crew of young guys and gals who mostly have never worked with him before for a weekend of definitely not fun in a hut somewhere far out in the woods, with the usual bagging of cell phones and other useful features of modernity to maintain isolation.

This being a Norwegian horror film, there’s also a lake in these woods, and as all Norwegian horror film lakes I have encountered, it is a creepy and threatening body of water. It certainly doesn’t become less so when the boys of the group find a female corpse in it, a discovery Gunnar decides nobody with a brain instead of a penis needs to know about until Sunday when they’re going back to civilization. The thing is, Gunnar doesn’t exactly smell of mental health, his tendency to dictatorial behaviour and sadism seems extreme even for a reality TV producer, and there’s clearly some shadow hanging over him – or more than one. That the group is soon encountering threatening and disturbing occurrences hardly needs mentioning, nor does the fact that there just might be someone or something out in these woods with a penchant for murder.

Pål Øie’s Dark Woods is apparently a minor classic of Norwegian horror, and it’s not difficult to understand why. The film’s gritty and grubby yet also controlled and stylish camera work milks the cabin and the excellently creepy woods for all they are worth, the shocks are well-constructed and often very cleverly staged, and the characters and their relationships are certainly portrayed with insight and care several levels above your usual slasher cabin full of meat.

In fact, the film is at its best whenever it exploits the spoken and unspoken tensions it creates between the characters to help escalate the outside threat. Much of what could be read as characters acting stupidly because it say so in the script in lesser films here plays out as the logical consequence of a handful of people bringing their problems and hang-ups into an enclosed space and really not turning out to be able to cope rationally with anything much.


Additionally, the plot is rather more complex than its final solution and plot twist show, containing another layer of hints and ambiguous facts that will make the chain of past events much less random than they appear. It is very much to the film’s honour that it is satisfied for its audience to either see this further layer or not.

Three Films Make A Post: Fear takes a road trip.

Broadcast News (1987): They sure don’t make romantic comedies like James L. Brooks’s film anymore, though I’m not sure they ever did make many romantic comedies with endings this sober-minded yet un-cynical that also worked just as well as media satires (in this case like Network if it were an actual film with characters instead of a very long self-satisfied rant). Add to that sharp and deep acting performances by Holly Hunter, William Hurt and Albert Brooks, dialogue that’s cutting and funny and wise and absurd all at the same time, direction that does a lot of thematic and emotional work without ever pointing to its own class, and you’ll be as confused as I am that this thing was actually once nominated for seven Oscars (but didn’t win any, don’t you worry).

Cave (2016): Another point to add to my list of “things movies taught me”: going on an illegal cave diving expedition isn’t such a swell idea if you are the members of a love triangle. Apart from bringing me that helpful insight, Henrik Martin Dahlsbakken’s cave-bound thriller looks slick and contains one and a half truly creepy scenes but lacks the psychological depth in its characters to be a proper character-based thriller, as well as the tight control a film like this needs to be truly suspenseful. It’s competent and not particularly clever, yet still would be a film I’d recommend for a bored afternoon or so, but the rest of my goodwill for the whole affair got eaten up by its ending. For after not even eighty minutes of plot, the narrative just stops on a cliffhanger (not a proper open ending, mind you) with titles informing us the sequel is going to be in cinemas soon, adding insult to injury and making quite sure I’m not going to waste my time on said sequel.


The Axe Murders of Villisca (2016): Taking place in the house where a bunch of historical axe murders happened, this indie production directed by Tony E. Valenzuela turned out to be rather better than the teenagers versus ghosts flick I expected it to be. The characters are somewhat more interesting than usual in this sort of thing (and well acted to boot), the script knows where it wants to be and how to get there, and the photography is often effectively moody. The film doesn’t quite manage to hold the tension it has built up throughout its final act but I enjoyed my time with it quite a bit. And unlike Cave, it has an actual ending.

In short: Ofelas (1987)

aka Pathfinder

Unlike the moving heavy metal album cover that is its later remake (and “remake” in this case really only means “film carrying the same title supposedly based on this one”), Nils Gaup’s medieval tale about a young Sami finding his family murdered at the hands of a band of marauding Chudes and kinda sorta trying to take revenge, is a thoughtful, considerate tale that spends as much time trying to reconstruct Sami life around the year 1000 or so than it does on its plot.

That’s not a bad thing, mind you, for the film is obviously a true labour of love for Gaup and his Sami actors, bringing their culture alive with an eye for grounding it in the experiences of actual people. Gaup shows us even the stranger (to the eyes of someone not a Sami of that time) ideas and customs as part of the way actual people live(d), treating them neither with the distance of a museum exhibit nor the glorifying gestures of someone who has something to prove. This film’s look at the past does very much want to show it as alive and human, hitting more universal human truths exactly through its specificity because truths aren’t generic but specific. Quite surprisingly – I at least wouldn’t have blamed the director or his film much if it had been otherwise – Ofelas even manages to sell its more spiritual side to this hardened sceptic, showing the way the mythic and the spiritual/supernatural were a part of the these people’s way of life without either poo-pooing it with Dawkinsian (and isn’t it sad that this once great popularizing scientist is by now better known as someone whose legacy is a demonstration that we atheists can be just as shitty as the worst of the religious people?) fervour nor holding it up as the one true way everyone should follow. It’s just the way the characters here relate to their world – judgement doesn’t really come into it at all. The film makes clear it is necessary to understand the spiritual life of its characters to understand them or the time and place they live in, something you can’t really do when you’re looking down on them.

Visually, Ofelas is of course dominated by its stark yet beautiful locations that - at least from my perspective – take on the clarity of the mythic under the light of the winter sun. As it so often is with things that look very simple to achieve, I’m quite sure Gaup must have worked hard on achieving this effect, but watching the film, I found myself much more concerned with being in its every moment than admiring the directors’ art; this being a particularly fine sort of artfulness.

There’s much else to like here too – the clear and natural performances of the cast, the way the film’s plot avoids the typical structure of a revenge tale (because philosophically, revenge really isn’t its point at all), the characters’ reactions to violence which would be coded as cowardly in most other films you’ll encounter but which Ofelas accepts at what they are – normal, and not the things that decide a human being’s worth.

Technorati-Markierungen: sami movies,norwegian movies,in short,adventure,drama,nils gaup,mikkel gaup,nils utsi,sara marit gaup

Thale (2012)

Elvis (Erlend Nervold) is helping out his friend Leo (Jon Sigve Skard) with a (legal) job cleaning the site of a death in a house out in the woods (proverbial and real). While Leo seems completely unflappable, Elvis isn’t really cut out for this particular part of the cleaning business - not just because of his propensity for vomiting when brushing away people parts but also because he’s rather nosy.

Consequently, it’s Elvis who stumbles upon the house’s hidden cellar, a place full of jury-rigged medical equipment and cassette tapes with ambiguous monologues of a male voice (Roland Astrand) which suggest there has been something at least very strange, if not highly untoward going on down there. However, the ambiance still doesn’t prepare the men for what they eventually find: a young naked woman (Silje Reinåmo) submerged in tub full of a milky fluid.

The woman seems to be mute, as well as rather confused and wild, and it’s a fair bet she has been going through some rather harsh things down in that cellar. Instead of calling an ambulance and the police, Leo and Elvis call their boss, who will certainly appear some time. So they wait with the girl, step by step realizing what happened in the cellar might not have been what they suspected had happened, and that the girl, let’s call her Thale, perhaps isn’t exactly human. However, the humanity of the young woman might not be their greatest problem (if it is a problem at all). Rather, opening the cellar door might have been a bad idea not because of what they find inside, but because of who might now find their way in.

Despite having read quite a bit about Aleksander Nordaas’s Thale before watching it, I found myself pleasantly surprised by parts of it. I wasn’t expecting this to be a fantasy film using Norwegian folklore around the hulder together with light horror influences, black humour, a light-handed sense of poetry and a believable feeling of compassion and respect for all things Other, rather than a more typical straight horror piece.

The film’s approach to the fantastic seems to be influenced by “hard fantasy” concepts, that is, establishing something magical (at least one of the things Thale does can hardly be explained otherwise), and then thinking its implications through with logic and coherence. At its worst, this approach can suck all the magic out of the supernatural, but when it is used with care and a sense of poetry like it is here, it gives a film the opportunity to ground the fantastic without destroying it. Of course, the implications of Thale’s existence the film suggest are not very original, seeing as they concern the human propensity to destroy and use everything that’s beautiful and/or different and potentially useful. But then, humanity at large hasn’t exactly shown itself very original on this point either.

Thale doesn’t treat this aspect with unremitting bleakness, though, and instead demonstrates a belief in the possibility of kindness, redemption and love; not through grand gestures – in fact, the film avoids showing one particular moment a comparable Hollywood production would have milked for ten tear-jerking minutes completely – that can turn humanism to kitsch so easily, but with a laconic matter-of-factness that works curiously well with the film’s sense of wonder. It’s always pleasant to find a film that acknowledges humanity’s darkest impulses without ending up in nihilism or cynicism.

That Nordaas achieves all this with only a handful of locations and actors and what I can only assume must have been a pretty low budget is a particular delight, as well as a demonstration that there’s still room for ambitious yet small movies hiding surprising complexities under their simplicity of means. Sure, if I’d be out to nitpick, I could criticize the few CGI effects as cheap-looking and not convincing in their physicality but with the Thale I’ve seen, that’s just not a point I care enough about to turn it into an actual problem.

Technorati-Markierungen: norwegian movies,reviews,fantasy,aleksander nordaas,silje reinåmo,erlend nervold,jon sigve skard

In short: Dead Snow 2 (2014)

aka Dead Snow: Red vs. Dead

If you, like me, were a little afraid Tommy Wirkola’s sequel to his Nazi zombies in the snow comedy Dead Snow would end up retreading the set pieces of the first film, you can happily run out and watch this, for Wirkola goes for escalation in everything but the now piddling amount of snow while still keeping things in dimensions a comparatively low budget can handle. Dead Snow 2 is really putting the emphasis on the action comedy more than the horror comedy, though with huge dollops of pleasantly ridiculous gore, clearly realizing the first film had done everything there was to do with the more claustrophobic set-ups it used. Wirkola is a wonderful director for this sort of madcap, blood-soaked comedy action – he’s got the timing down as well as your favourite director of classic Hong Kong martial arts cinema had, and he knows how to include millions of dumb sight gags in an action scene without distracting too much from the rest of what’s going on in it.

The humour is again of a mostly low-brow, rather ruthless style that will go wherever a gory joke might lead it: if any given scene set-up will result in the question “will the film really go there?” it is most certainly going to.

Quite against my usual tastes, this approach works rather well for me in Dead Snow 2’s case, with hardly a minute going by that doesn’t at least provoke a snort – unless it provokes a groan, or the always lovely combination of both. Because this is that sort of film, there are also movie quotes that turn into inversions of the source material, American zombie hunters who are competent and ridiculous nerds and seem to be written by someone who has never met an actual American nerd in his life, a single tank (I said the budget must still have been rather low), and a climactic brawl between Nazi zombies and Soviet Russian soldiers, like the bloodiest Spencer/Hill film Italian exploitation cinema should have made.

Like everything else directed by Wirkola I’ve seen, Dead Snow 2 is fast, fun, silly and charming as hell, and while I understand why some people really can’t stand his films, I am rather happy I do.

Technorati-Markierungen: norwegian movies,in short,horror,comedy,action,tommy wirkola,vegar hoel

In short: Escape (2012)

Original title: Flukt

Norway, in 1363. In the aftermath of the black plague, what little there had been of social order is destroyed, leaving the remaining population fighting for their lives or attempting to flee for more prosperous shores.

The family of young Signe (Isabel Christine Andreasen) attempts the latter, but an encounter with a group of bandits under the leadership of a woman named Dagmar (Ingrid Bolsø Berdal) leaves everyone except the teenager dead. For Signe, Dagmar has other plans. Dagmar has adopted a girl named Frigg (Milla Olin), and now has ambitions to get her hands on a little sister for her. Trouble is, Dagmar can’t get children, so she decides Signe would make a nice replacement birth mother for a prospective sister, notwithstanding the fact that Signe’s hardly a woman, or minor things like the rape(s) that are necessarily part of this plan.

Frigg isn’t quite at the point where she’s as ruthless as Dagmar yet, though, and frees Signe. Because one of Dagmar’s men witnesses the deed, Frigg flees together with the older girl, which of course does make Dagmar’s resulting attempts to get her “daughter” back rather more enthusiastic than I’d imagine them to have been if they had only been about Signe.

I know Escape’s director Roar Uthaug from the generic competence of the first Cold Prey film, that of course also starred Ingrid Bolsø Berdal though in a rather more pleasant role, so I mostly expected the film at hand to be about the same – competent but lacking in substance or imagination.

Turns out I was wrong again, for while Escape is certainly a slickly made film, it’s also one with a personality of its own that adds more than enough interesting, even surprising, elements to its basic historical adventure set-up. For the most part, it’s the film’s tight focus that impresses most about it, Uthaug’s ability to tell a tale Hollywood would bloat up to two and a half hours in less than one and a half, without ever losing control or keeping things too superficial. There’s a leanness and sparseness on display that fits Norway’s – quite breathtakingly photographed – landscape as well as it fits the way the characters’ medieval lives are by necessity turning out.

Uthaug is particularly good at providing the film’s main characters with additional dimensions and life in just the same way: Dagmar has a tragic past that explains a lot of what she is doing and why she does it without the film ever feeling the need to excuse her with it, and Signe’s guilt for the death of her family makes perfect sense as the driving factor even for the on paper slightly preposterous (and pretty final girl-like) finale. The film never gets soppy there, nor does it fall into the trap of explaining too much – there’s a clear belief in the audience understanding meaningful gestures even when they are small on display. The actors for their parts do know how deliver these gestures well.

Consequently, the film’s well-filmed genre action is grounded as a tale of actual human beings rather than the adventures of walking and talking tropes, and becomes more meaningful, more effective, and just more human, by it, making Escape a movie well worth watching.

Technorati-Markierungen: norwegian movies,roar uthaug,isabel christine andreasen,ingrid bolsø berdal,milla olin,in short,adventure

Headhunters (2011)

Original title: Hodejegerne

Corporate headhunter Roger Brown (Aksel Hennie) needs a lot of money to finance his costly lifestyle and try to buy the affection of his wife Diana (Synnøve Macody Lund) by financing her career as an art dealer, definitely more than even the job as the proverbial asshole in a suit can make him.

To stay affluent, our rather immoral hero has found an interesting side job. During his interviews with other assholes in suits, he finagles information about the security of their homes and the state of their art collections out of them, and then proceeds - with the help of security firm drone Ove Kjikerud (Eivind Sander) - to rob them of the highlights of said art collections.

This goes rather well for Roger until he meets Clas Greve (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), square-jawed pretty-man, co-developer of a nano tracing agent and former special forces soldier. Apart from being much too perfect for comfort, Greve also owns a Rubens painting that's believed to be lost that he wants Diana to appraise for him. The painting makes Greve an irresistible target for Roger even though his background fairly screams "Do not fuck with this guy".

When Roger breaks into Greve's apartment he finds the painting alright, but he also finds Diana's cell right in the bedroom. It's the sort of thing to drive a man like Roger who's desperately trying to hide his inferiority complex behind a wall of money batty, though, seeing as he has just ended an extra-marital affair of his own, he really isn't in a position to complain.

From this point on, Roger's life - always more like a dance on a knife's edge - unravels with ever increasing speed, for Greve is neither the kind of guy who let's himself be robbed, nor somebody who cares about killing anyone who might get in his way (and any bystanders if he feels like it). Soon enough, Roger is on the run, yet Greve somehow manages to find him wherever he turns. Roger not only has to avoid a guy who is an actual sociopath (in contrast to himself, who only ever aspired to be one), but also learns the truths behind the lies he built his life on.

Director Morten Tyldum's Headhunters (based on a novel by Jo Nesbø) is quite the film. Call me conceited, but I didn't exactly peg Norway as a country suited to coming up with the next great chase thriller with fine side-lines in black humour and paranoia. As is so often the case, I was wrong, and have now found chase thriller nirvana in form of a Norwegian movie.

The most important element in this sort of film is obviously a sense of pacing. Tyldum starts his film up at a merry jog, quickly establishing the characters and the basic situation while still showing complexities that will become important during the course of the movie. With things being established, the film fastly moves on to the first crisis point, escalates from there with incredible style and verve, all the while going through often exceedingly clever, always exceedingly well-timed twists and turns, never letting the tension drop for a second even when the running and the violence stop for a moment - for that's when the paranoia steps up to the plate. In that respect, Headhunters is very close to genre-companions made in the 70s, but instead of trying to be retro, Tyldum's film uses contemporary filmmaking techniques without looking like a tech demonstration or a bad video clip.

As if that weren't enough (and really, being clever and perfectly paced would be enough to recommend the film highly), Headhunters also manages the difficult trick of building up its protagonist as a complete jerk, yet still letting the audience root for him. At first, I found something grimly satisfying at seeing Roger's life unravel, but the further the story developed, and the more Roger lost, the more I began rooting for him, and the - formerly buried - humanity his reactions to his plight revealed. Much of my reaction is based on Aksel Hennie's performance that shows the frail humanity Roger hides behind his asshole attitude without ever actually making him nice. The character's psychology is actually a bit too simple for my tastes (too many writers - for the screen or not - love to motivate everything about a character through one single Big Thing - something that's clearly useful for plotting reasons, but that I don't believe to be true for actual human beings; and that thing about stripping a character of everything they have to reveal their humanity isn't exactly new either), yet in the hands of Hennie - and the excellent foils the rest of the cast make for him - this simplicity seems grounded in more complex feelings and reasons.

So, all in all, it's pretty fair to describe Headhunters as "awesome". It is, after all, a fantastic chase thriller that also happens to have its heart in the right place.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: norwegian movies,reviews,morten tyldum,aksel hennie,nikolaj coster-waldau,synnøve macody lund,thriller