Headhunters (Hodejegerne)

Review

There are two kinds of thrillers: the newfangled shaky-cam ones that tap into your fight-or-flight responses and make you sick with fear, and the Hitchcockian ones that toy with you, that give you the time and space to laugh with perverse delight at your own helplessness. The Norwegian Headhunters, from a novel by Jo Nesbø, is the second, happier kind: a droll bloodbath. It centers, as so many good thrillers do, on an orderly man whose system is both precise and precarious. His name is Roger Brown (Aksel Hennie), and he’s a top-level corporate recruiter�a headhunter�who moonlights as an art thief. The reason he can’t get by on his handsome salary is complicated. He’s a fine-looking fellow with a wide, chiseled face and penetrating eyes, but he’s also five-foot-six and has, so to speak, married up. His wife, Diana (Synnøve �Macody Lund), is a statuesque blonde who’s a full head taller in heels, and keeping her, he’s convinced, requires living way above his means. On one level, he deserves a comeuppance, not just for stealing but also for yoking his self-esteem to a beautiful woman. Yet in his thefts he attains such elegance�deftly slipping great works of art out of their frames and replacing them with forgeries, calm in the knowledge that his marks are at lunch dates that he has arranged�that you half-�admire his twisted design for living. He’s the perfect thriller mascot.

The Oslo-based Nesbø, who’s often likened to Stieg Larsson on account of his being a Scandinavian genre writer and that’s all, is known for a series of enjoyable novels featuring Harry Hole, a very tall, shaven-headed, ragingly alcoholic police detective who gives strangers the impression he’s a derelict. It must have been fun for Nesbø to take a break with a book about a short, exacting thief who’s proud of his thick head of hair and strives to keep up appearances. (Forging artwork is a good metaphor for living a lie, although Nesbø never pushes it.) The film’s director, Morten Tyldum, is marvelously in tune with his material. The syncopated opening scenes are crisp and on the beat, buoyed by Roger’s mastery, his breezy way of extracting information from the wealthy men he’s interviewing for jobs about their artwork, home alarm systems, wives, dogs, etc. Tyldum’s technique is so spring-heeled that for a long while it seems as if Headhunters is going to be a caper comedy with little in the way of violence�until the first, crazy bullets fly and Roger is suddenly, vertiginously, in over his head in blood and shit. That’s not, by the way, a casual turn of phrase. Coprophobes, beware.

Headhunters is one of those madly convoluted chase movies that have you constantly asking, �What the hell is going on?� while at the same time feeling certain, for no rational reason, that it will all make sense when the wind stops blowing north-northwest and you can once more tell a hawk from a handsaw. Who’s the hawk? It might be a sleek, powerful Dutchman named Clas Greve (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), an ex-soldier and former head of a company specializing in high-tech surveillance equipment. First seen chatting up Diana in her art gallery, Greve is a terrific candidate for a CEO position that Roger is trying to fill. More important, he claims to have discovered in the home of his dead grandmother a Rubens that went lost after the Nazis’ defeat. Hearing of the Rubens, Roger looks at least three inches taller. The compact Hennie is a wonderful actor, smoothly congenial when confident, uproarious when rattled. And he will be rattled�as well as stabbed, shorn, bitten, mangled, and worse.

Director Tyldum winds his jack-in-the-boxes in full view, and still you jump when they’re sprung. What’s with Roger’s clingy mistress (Julie Ølgaard), who grabs hold of his hair and won’t let go? How about Roger’s accomplice, Ove (Eivind Sander), a jolly paranoiac who stashes all manner of guns around his cabin along with a hidden camera to capture his trysts with his beloved, a Russian prostitute? Is that �Rubens a MacGuffin or a red herring? Or is it a red herring smeared atop a toasted MacGuffin? Grisly thrillers don’t get much more delectable. — David Edelstein

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• David Edelstein's Full Review (4/30/12)