Hodejegerne

Morten Tyldum (2011)

Sometimes, a little way into a film, I’m not sure if there’ll be anything to write about.  As a rule, this doubt quickly passes – however good or bad the film is – but Headhunters proved the exception to the rule.  The highest-grossing Norwegian movie of all time, this adaptation of Jo Nesbo’s 2008 novel is an efficient and unpleasant crime drama:  what more can be said?  It was only the widespread critical acclaim for Headhunters that made me think again.   The Rotten Tomatoes (92% ‘fresh’ rating) consensus reads ‘Grisly, twisty, and darkly comic … an exhilaratingly oddball take on familiar thriller elements’.  Comments on the site from ‘top critics’ include ‘a dark adult entertainment, a wild and bloody adrenaline rush of a movie that deals in gleeful grotesqueness and over-the-top implausibilities’ (Kenneth Turan) and ‘Always deliriously entertaining’ (Tom Huddleston).

The protagonist of Headhunters is a man called Roger Brown (Aksel Hennie), a highly successful headhunter – in the executive search consultant sense of the word.  Roger (a Norwegian, in spite of the name) more than supplements his salaried income by stealing paintings from clients.  His wife Diana (Synnovy Macody Lund) works more legitimately in the art world:  at the opening of her new gallery, Roger is introduced to a man called Clas Greve (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), recently arrived in Oslo from Amsterdam, who expresses an interest in a senior job in a GPS technologies company, for which Roger is managing the recruitment.  After a game of squash with him (getting to know the client is important), Roger notices scars on Clas’s back; the latter explains these as a legacy from his military service – Clas was part of a Dutch special forces unit which specialised in ‘tracking people down’.  Roger also learns from Diana that Clas owns a rare Rubens painting and, in the process of stealing it, discovers Diana’s cell phone by Clas’s unmade bed.  Roger’s partner in crime is a man called Ove (Elvind Sander), who deactivates security at the houses Roger breaks into.  The day after his visit to Clas’s home, Roger discovers Ove’s apparently dead body.   Appearances being deceptive, Ove comes back to life as Roger tries to dump him in a lake but, in a shoot-out at Ove’s home shortly afterwards, Roger kills him in self-defence.  When he comes out of Ove’s house, he finds Clas waiting for him.  From this point onwards, Roger is the head being hunted – not only by a man with previous human tracking experience but soon also by the police.   After many gruelling, usually gory ordeals, the story ends happily for Roger and Diana and badly for just about everyone else, including Roger’s former mistress Lotte (Julie Olgaard).  The tensions in Roger’s marriage were the result of disagreement about whether to have a child – Diana was for and he against it.  In the last shot of Diana, she is heavily pregnant.  Roger returns to work but not (I assumed but this may be wishful thinking) to criminal moonlighting.

Thanks to Morten Tyldum’s direction and the screenplay by Lars Gudmestad and Ulf Ryberg, Headhunters is commendably brisk and concise.  It’s also cleverly plotted – even though Roger’s ingenuity in ensuring that the police won’t be able to touch him for any of the several deaths in the story is revealed uninterestingly, in an eleventh hour voiceover explanation.   Somewhat more interesting is the question of whether – in spite of his cocksure amorality, and professional and personal duplicity – Roger will, once he’s on the receiving end of more aggressively malignant treatment, engage the viewer’s sympathies.  I didn’t root for him but he’s only five feet six inches tall (his beautiful wife towers over him), which helps the underdog cause, and Aksel Hennie – a cross between Christopher Walken and Lleyton Hewitt – brings eccentric charisma to the role.  I doubt if these things matter, though, for those who find Headhunters enjoyable.  The film is described on Wikipedia as a ‘comedy action thriller’.  Although there are some witty enough moments, it never occurred to me that I was watching a comedy but if you immediately perceive the film as one, perhaps you can find Roger amusing even in his obnoxiousness.

Perhaps you’re able to treat the graphic and sustained violence as a laugh too.    I understand, even though I don’t subscribe to, the cinema-as-pure-sensation school of thought.   What I don’t understand about something like Headhunters is how critics capable of stern censure of American action thrillers that expect you to go with the violent flow manage to do just that with Scandi-noir.  Just what is it that turns something into ‘a dark adult entertainment’ and thus redeems its being ‘a wild and bloody adrenaline rush … that deals in gleeful grotesqueness and over-the-top implausibilities’ (all qualities of movies and video games that are widely condemned as mindless and dangerous)?    Three months after his enthusiastic review of Headhunters, Kenneth Turan wrote, in the light of the cinema shootings at the midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colorado, ‘it is impossible to be surrounded by the 21st century’s blood-soaked cinematic culture and not wonder what effect it’s having on us’.

22 January 2015