Movie review: In Order of Disappearance is Norwegian noir

By Jay Stone

Two unexpected but reliable characteristics of Scandinavian cinema — a taste for snowbound violence and a dark sense of humor — are on display in In Order of Disappearance, a revenge movie that looks sort of like what might happen if the Coen Brothers moved to the outskirts of Oslo. It’s the story of a snowplow driver named Nils Dickman (too bad David Letterman is off the air) whose son is killed when he is caught up in a drug war and who sets of with gun and fist to teach the bad guys that they screwed with the wrong Norwegian.

The snowplow guy — whom we meet accepting a citizen-of-the-year award for all the good work he’s done driving his giant snowblower along the treacherous and empty highways — is played by Stellan Skarsgard, the versatile Swedish actor (Good Will Hunting, Girl With The Dragon Tattoo) with a nice combination of small-town innocence and a dangerous thirst for revenge. It helps that Nils is also the smartest person thereabouts: the film’s original title is Kraftidioten.

Director Hans Petter Moland sets the film in a spare and chilly landscape of snow banks, dotted with impressively designed modernist houses with sleek kitchens and hip, underfurnished living rooms. It underscores a basic hollowness in the film’s morality and, eventually, believability. It’s also a place for some of the movie’s sly visual gags: at one stage, the chief bad guy, a bloodthirsty vegan gang leader known as The Count (Pal Sverre Hagen), sits in a chair that is designed as a hollow face and peers back through the eyeholes at his departing ex-wife (Birgitte Hjort Sorensen), who bursts into random scenes with an endless list of grievances and legal threats.

She’s just the comely subtext to a violent plot. Nils, devastated by his son’s death, begins at the bottom, beating up hoods until they tell him who they’re reporting to, and then working his way up the corporate ladder, as it were. Everyone seems to have a colourful name — Spike, or “The Chinaman “ (a Japanese living in Denmark) — one of those gangster tropes that the movie stops briefly to analyze before it heads off to another brutal beating. Moland keeps track of the deaths with title cards of the deceased characters written under solemn crosses, allowing a measure of dignity that is missing when we see how Nils disposes of his victims by wrapping them in chicken wire and throwing them into a picturesque nearby waterfall. Norway really does look lovely.

A second strand of narrative comes when The Count deduces — wrongly, of course — that the murders of his underlings are being carried out by a rival gang, which he calls “The Albanians,” even through they’re Serb. They’re headed by Papa (veteran actor Bruno Ganz, most familiar from Wings of Desire), who speaks in a coarse whisper and lives in an old-world home of embroidered rugs and carved tables that has been created inside a large empty warehouse surrounded, as is everything, by snow. Papa is sentimental.

Screenwriter Kim Fupz Aakeson adds a couple of hapless policemen who are chasing the mayhem, although they’re barely in the picture, and two Serbian heavies who discuss minutiae in the manner of Quentin Tarantino characters — questions of why welfare states are always cold countries, for instance, or the joys of the local prison system — who underline their sadism with quotidian interests.

Altogether, it’s a loosey-goosey affair that loses track of its protagonist for a while as it settles into the Serbian war. Not that it matters: despite Skarsgard’s subtle performance, Nils is mostly a cipher who hasn’t been given enough personality traits beyond his ability to drive a plow. There’s a Hollywood remake coming, with Liam Neeson the possible star. That should make everything clear.

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