Headhunters - Hodejegerne

Bea says:  "A Norwegian thriller", Cecil told me, and that sounded a good prospect after the massive success of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Killing, and so on. So on a wet Saturday afternoon we did a little shopping, a little bit of lunch, and a damp walk around a bit of the city walls in York before heading over to the City Screen to catch this one for an afternoon matinée.

And a great rip-roaring tale it was too - Roger Brown is a headhunter for an IT type firm, Pathfinder, but lives well beyond his means with a beautiful trophy wife and gorgeous suburban house. To fund his lifestyle, he steals valuable works of art and sells them on. However, things quickly spiral out of control when the mysterious and enigmatic Clas arrives in town, a prime candidate for a Pathfinder job, he is both the temporary owner of a valuable piece of art and a rival for Brown's wife's affections. The intricate plot is quite fun to follow, and in fact kept me guessing most of the time, although there were a few "er - that wouldn't happen" moments. Not at all likeable at first, the sequence of events and trials makes us warm to Roger as the story develops.

Quite a lot of blood, gore and sex, but no overly fancy special effects - just a good story and a nice, tightly directed and well-acted piece. Definitely worth seeing, and a must-see if you have been enjoying the recent Scandinavian take on the thriller genre.
****

Cecil says: I thought at first that the director of Headhunters must also have made all "The Girl..." films, because the style is so similar, but I actually preferred the plot to this one, which never descended into what I always call 'Scoobie-Do' moments.

There's something low-key, but almost slapstick about Scandinavian humour, even if the two concepts sound like a contradiction.  And this film, although a thriller, was also comic at times, so disastrous were the various events that took poor Roger Brown from his racy, but unlikeable lifestyle to a desperate state where he is fighting for his life in some very unsavoury and blood-curdling moments.

For a crime-thriller, Headhunters did quite a good job at character development.  Roger Brown may have won our affections as the film progressed, but by the end, we didn't know who to trust from all the other characters: Clas was clearly pretty evil, but what of Diana, or Lotte? Who COULD he trust? Who should we like?

As Be a says, there were a couple of moments where the dialogue or the action didn't quite seem plausible, but on the whole this film raced along and pulled the audience with it. A good afternoon's entertainment.

And what a great cinema York's City Screen is. If you've never been there, check out all the posters on York's old independent cinemas, including this cinema in its early days. But did the church bells from next door always chime through into the auditorium as they did half way through yesterday's film? Took us a while to realise that they couldn't possibly be from the film itself...

****