IN ORDER OF DISAPPEARANCE (Kraftidioten, 2014)

American movie fans nowadays will most likely recognize Stellan Skarsgaard as dear, dotty old Dr. Selvig from the Thor and Avengers movies. Closer to home, apparently, the 65 year old actor is a Scandinavian Liam Neeson, at least for this one film by his frequent collaborator, Hans Petter Moland. He'd have some credibility with home audiences in such a role, as he'd played the "Swedish James Bond" Carl Hamilton in a couple of movies back in the Nineties, among other heroic parts. But unlike the typical Neeson character in his post-Taken vehicles, or even Michael Caine's Harry Brown, Skarsgaard's aged vigilante in Kraftidioten -- that Google Translates from Norwegian to "Power Idiot," though I like the translated from Swedish option, "Power Jerk," better --  doesn't seem to have a background that would give him the very special skills required to wage a one-man war on crime. Instead, he's the Swedish snowplow driver and Man of the Year of a snowy Norwegian town whose son ends up as collateral damage during a bit of gangster discipline. The kid was left propped up on a park bench to look as if he'd overdosed, but Nils Dickmann knows that his boy wouldn't do drugs, and so deduces that he was murdered. When the boy's buddy, the gangsters' intended victim, tells him the true story, Nils goes on the warpath.

Since Kraftidioten is described as a black comedy, we probably shouldn't ask how Nils manages to get the jump on supposedly badass gangsters so often. We are, after all, dealing with idiots led by "The Count" (Pal Sverre Hagen), whose most formidable antagonist seems to be his ex-wife until a mystery man starts bumping off his flunkies. He counts as a "Count," presumably, because he's tall, thin and evil-looking, somewhere between a John Carradine Count and a Christopher Lee type. Understandably not suspecting a civilian vigilante, the Count convinces himself that the local Serbian mob (he keeps confusing them with Albanians) must be trying to muscle in on his territory, despite their agreement to share the local airport. Nils thus inadvertently starts a gang war.

Ironically, once Nils tries to think like a gangster, he begins to screw up. Realizing that he's unlikely to reach the top man in the organization, he goes to his brother, a onetime minor mobster nicknamed "Wingman," for advice on hiring a hitman. Once Nils pays him in full up front (Wingman advised only half), the hitman takes him for an easy mark and sells him out to the Count, only to be killed for offending the mob leader's sense of honor. Unfortunately, the hitman only knew his employer as "Dickmann," and the only person of that name the Count knows is Wingman. In short order, Nils has more to avenge, while the Serbs (led by the Swiss actor Bruno Ganz) go to war to avenge their own, wrongly blamed for Nils' rampage.This escalating conflict actually gives Nils some breathing space. He and the Serbs have the same idea of kidnapping the Count's son, but when a round of negotiation stalls the Serbs staking out the boy's school, Nils has an opening to snatch him. Conveniently also, once the Count finally figures out who's been plaguing him, he can't take proper revenge on Nils, or get his boy back, before the Serbs come charging in for a final bloody showdown....

Film directors love to stage violence in wintry landscapes, for they make the ideal ironically immaculate backdrop for the darkest dirtiest deeds. Kraftidioten will certainly remind American viewers of Fargo, but there are plenty of Japanese films, Sergio Corbucci's Great Silence, Tarantino's Hateful Eight and no doubt some Scandinavian movies that do the same things. Moland has an ace collaborator in Philip Ogaard, who really makes the most of the Norwegian locations. Together, director and cinematographer make Kraftidioten a constantly picturesque film with plenty of screencap opportunities. The way their picture really reminded me of a Japanese movie was the way they recorded characters' deaths, with an obituary title card for each victim and a rather crowded one after the final shootout. This gimmick, which presumably inspired the film's English-language title, put me in mind of Kinji Fukasaku's Battles Without Honor and Humanity, but for Moland the effect is meant to be more comically distancing than appalling. It's really not that comic a film, however, unless you agree that violence is innately funny. One of its comic climaxes comes when the stressed-out Count finally lashes out and KOs his ex with one punch. That may strike some people as politically incorrect, but I think the joke is that he knows no other way to deal with her, not that she's a bitch who got what was coming to her. However, I can't really make an excuse for the joke that ends the film, a poorly executed payoff to a gag that had been started and presumably forgotten a long time before. It just looked like a desperate attempt to end the film on a jokey grimdark note and put one more obit card on the screen. Overall, though, Kraftidioten is pretty entertaining, always fine to look at and sometimes genuinely funny as far as black crime comedies go, even as Skarsgaard plays his avenger utterly straight like a killer Keaton. Don't take it too seriously and you may well enjoy it.

THE LAST KING (Birkebeinerne, 2016)

On the snowy slopes of thirteenth century Norway, warriors on skis must have traveled faster than any man could without the aid of a horse. Their speed lends a thrilling novelty to Nils Gaup's compact epic, which admirably gets a big job done in little more than 90 minutes. Gaup is on somewhat familiar ground, having made his name globally with the similarly set 1987 film Pathfinder. In Birkebeinerne (the Last King title doesn't seem relevant to the story) it's 1206 or thereabouts and Norway is torn between two powerful factions, the titular good guys ("birchlegs" in some translations) and the bad guy Baglers. For an outsider it's hard to tell what each party stands for, though there's an interesting anticlerical angle in the film's emphasis on the Baglers' alignment with the Vatican that's underscored by a Birkebeiner's scoffing attitude toward prayers over a wounded ally. Suffice it to say that the poisoning of a young king puts the Baglers' man in power, but a mere baby boy has a more legitimate claim. It's up to the Birkebeiners to keep the baby safe while they try to raise an army in his name. The child's location is confided to Skjerveld (Jakob Oftebro), but the Baglers are on to him. They threaten his wife and his own small child with death unless he confesses where the baby king has been hidden. Skjerveld cracks, only to be mocked by the Bagler commander for having less fortitude than his wife, whom the commander orders killed out of pure spite.

 

Skjerveld, aided by his buddy Torstein (Kristofer Hivju), now has a twofold mission of revenge for his family and redemption for himself. Only a Bagler attack saves him from execution after he admits his betrayal, but he and Torstein take the baby to the next safe house, with the big-bad Bagler commander in hot pursuit. The chase scenes are exhilarating in an almost anachronistic way, since we still expect James Bond, not some furry medieval man, doing this sort of thing.

 

Our heroes finally patch together a little army that should be enough to ambush the Baglers as they fall into a trap baited with the baby king on a sled. The movie exposes its budgetary limitations in the big attack, although I suppose that a mere handful of ski-jumping warriors could well wreak havoc on a conventional horseback army. In any event, the final battle is nicely plotted to set up a redemptive showdown between Skjerveld and the Bagler commander, the last of the one band of bad guys to escape the trap and threaten the little king. It's all based on fact, although I read that Norwegian historians unsurprisingly found the film's version of events oversimplified. Birkebeinerne is no masterpiece, but it's cool to get a decent action film that comes with a history lesson to broaden your knowledge of the wild world of cinema.

MAX MANUS (2008)

It seems as if the 21st century revival of Jean-Pierre Melville's Resistance thriller Army of Shadows has inspired a small genre of neo-Resistance films, including Denmark's Flame & Citron, France's Army of Crime and, debatably, Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds. Perhaps it has to do with a now-universal sense of being under siege in the age of terrorism, or with a subconscious itch to emulate Islam's intrepid bomb-makers, or with a feeling of envy toward or inadequacy compared to the heroes of the World War II (aka "greatest") generation. Whatever the impetus, Max Manus is Norway's entry in the field, based on the real-life exploits of the country's greatest resistance hero, as told by him in a two-part memoir. It appears on an American DVD with the tacky subtitle "Man of War," as if Manus were a video game hero -- an impression his name doesn't exactly dispel.

 

Joachim Ronning and Espen Sandberg have directed a slick thriller with impeccable production values about a man who established his belligerent credentials before the war came to Norway, fighting for the Finns against the Soviet invasion of 1939. In his own country, Manus (Aksel Hennie) becomes known as "the window jumper" for his desperate attempt to escape the Gestapo early on, though he eventually owes his freedom to a friendly, patriotic nurse after he's hospitalized under guard.  He makes his way to Scotland, where the Brits train a special Norwegian unit of guerrilla commandos to carry out acts of sabotage against the Germans. Through skill and luck he earns the reputation of an escape artist among his own people and his Nazi antagonists, and earns recognition as the leader of the resistance -- a status ultimately confirmed when he gets to ride shotgun in the King's car during a victory parade. His campaign climaxes with his attempt to blow up the SS Donau, a cargo ship converted into a deadly anti-aircraft platform. Belying German efficiency, Manus and his team manage to board the ship without papers by telling the crew and guards that they're electricians on a repair job. As it happens, the Donau does have electrical troubles, but it and the harbor also have soldiers with a habit of peppering the water with machine-gun bullets just in case anyone happens along in an inflatable raft who doesn't belong there. Manus's gang will have to run that gauntlet if they want to watch their handiwork go boom....

Max Manus is efficiently made on every level and will satisfy anyone looking for realistic World War II action, but it isn't really anything more than an efficient war film until the final reel, when peace demoralizes Manus more than any wartime setback. He wasn't the only one for whom the war was a liberating experience before his country was liberated, nor the only one whom war made more important than he ever could have been in civilian life. Victory deflates him, and he crashes hard, his depression compounded by a bad case of survivor's guilt illustrated by ghosts toasting him in his flag-draped apartment. He's drawn out of his self-pitying shell by the love of a good woman, but Ronning and Sandberg film his triumphant ride in the victory parade both as an epic payoff to the great adventure and as a reminder that Manus's alienation persists on a level that isn't readily abandoned. As the crowds hail him, he gazes into the rear-view mirror in a manner just slightly reminiscent of Travis Bickle at the end of Taxi Driver.

The closing title cards inform us that Manus struggled with alcoholism and emotional issues for the rest of his life, but still managed to run a business and play the part of national hero with what looks like a natural modesty, based on the documentary footage included on the DVD, for another fifty years. For me at least, those final scenes, well performed by Aksel Hennie, were a bigger payoff than blowing up a warship, and they make Max Manus something more than a simple patriotic saga. For some men of war, victory and peace don't automatically mean happiness ever after. They just mark the start of a different kind of struggle.

Here's a trailer that includes actual English-language dialogue from the picture, uploaded to YouTube from jrroenberg.

TROUBLED WATER (De Usynlige, 2008)

The original Norwegian title translates to something like "the invisibles" according to one IMDB reviewer, but the American title of Erik Poppe's spiritual thriller refers to both a fatal stream and the Simon & Garfunkel song which Thomas, our protagonist, plays on a church organ for a field-trip audience of schoolchildren. Thomas is an ex-con who learned to play the pipe organ for prison services. He got an early release to find work as an organist. He was convicted along with a friend for the murder of a small boy whom they snatched from its mother when she wasn't looking. Thomas has always insisted he was innocent, and his flashbacks show the kid apparently dying from a fall took while running away from the bigger boys. Thomas made matters worse, however, by putting the boy's body in the river, from which it's never been retrieved. But while he insists that he didn't murder little Isak, he clearly feels guilty about it, and he doesn't trust himself around small boys. I should add that, from what I could tell, there was nothing sexual about his or his friend's intentions toward Isak; they just wanted to mess around with him.

Thomas's friend is a little jealous of the early release and arranges a parting beat-down for the lucky bastard. Despite damaged fingers he impresses the church staff even though they'd already told him they'd hired someone else, and since the someone else can't take the job right away Thomas gets it. He's a little uncomfortable working in a church because he's no believer, but it's a living -- only there's this one boy who hangs around and seems awfully interested. He turns out to be Jens, the son of Anna, the resident priest of this Lutheran church. It's an interesting twist to have a single mother performing the mass, as if in imitation of Mary rather than Christ, but I think Poppe underdevelops the spiritual implications of Thomas's growing attraction to Anna and the eventual shoulders-and-sheets consummation of their mutual attraction. The main action of this section is Thomas's overcoming of his alienation and his mistrust of himself as he edges toward a big-brother if not paternal relationship with Jens. His new life is threatened, however, by the coincidental presence in the same town of the parents of Isak, the drowned boy. We learn that the mother has been questioning church people about him and that she got into his stuff in the organ booth at least once. When Thomas goes to confront her, the father throws him out. Nothing short of the confession of murder that Thomas refuses to make will satisfy them.

For Thomas, music rather than religion is his mode of spiritual expression, but it can't stave off all feelings of guilt and dread.

Still, Thomas and Anna's romance grows. He finally comes down from the organ booth to take communion and then enjoys a kind of carnal mass with her in naked privacy. He's also taking Jens on outings and errands, and it's on one of these that the boy disappears.

Anna offers Thomas the Body of Christ, but we know whose body he really wants.

When Poppe cuts from Thomas's frantic search for Jens to Agnes's frantic search for her son Isak in the past he hopes to have the audience hooked. He's inviting us to jump to a conclusion about what's happened to Jens, but before we find out he sends us back in time, now following Agnes through scenes we've already seen, some we've heard about regarding her, others which we've seen already but didn't know she was in. We see a woman who's rebuilt her life with two adopted kids and a career tending to kids as a schoolteacher, with a husband who takes steps to prevent her from encountering Thomas but can't control all events. Trine Dyrholm portrays a woman going mad with hate and fear, and Poppe portrays her like someone on the opposite side of a funhouse mirror from where we and Thomas had been standing. We see her through the plexiglas of car windows, and in one eerie scene in a swimming pool she seems to be arching through the air above the water rather than swimming in it.

Trine Dyrholm as Agnes

The big question I can't answer without spoiling the picture is whether you'd be right in your assumption that Agnes has kidnapped Jens. I can only say that I found the climax a little too melodramatic and a little too neat in its note of reconciliation. Agnes gets to hear what she's wanted to hear at one point, but I wonder whether it was necessary to the story for Thomas to say it or for what he says to be true. Maybe Poppe worried that Agnes would look too much like a villain otherwise, because he doesn't intend to punish her as one. In fact, it may seem unfair to some viewers for the denouement to have Agnes return to the embraces of her family while Thomas is left in suspense as to whether he'll have one someday.

Past and present on Troubled Water

For the most part, De Usynlige effectively maintains a tone of dread while we remain unsure of the feelings Thomas struggles with and we worry about what Agnes may have done. It benefits from an effective ensemble of actors, with Dyrholm standing out. Pal Sverre Valheim Hagen best conveys Thomas's distress in action scenes, when he rides his bike through the night in a state of moral panic or when he's searching for Jens. Ellen Dorrit Petersen as Anna the priest is more a romantic interest than a spiritual leader, or maybe Poppe and writer Harold Rosenlow-Eeg think her spirituality resides in her romantic potential. Because she's eclipsed by Agnes as the main female character, Anna isn't as fully developed as she should be given the inherent drama in her vocation. Then again, maybe Norway takes female priests for granted in a way many Americans can't just yet.

Troubled Water is another Film Movement DVD presentation, which I've borrowed from the Albany Public Library. I'd say any library that wants to have a respectable foreign film collection ought to subscribe to this outfit's output. I get the impression that the film hasn't been seen much in the U.S. apart from the Hamptons International Film Festival, where it won an audience award and probably earned the blurbs from Alec Baldwin and Michael Moore that adorn the box cover. While those may not be the most authoritative reviewers, I'll tell you that it's worth a look at least to keep up to date on Norwegian cinema. I liked it overall, but I can imagine other viewers liking it better than I did.

Here's an unsubtitled Norwegian trailer uploaded to YouTube by paradoxaf. I hope I've given you enough information to make it comprehensible.

COLD PREY (Fritt Vilt, 2006)

One object of my ongoing survey of the wild world of cinema is to see if they still do things differently in foreign countries. Back in the day you could tell the European genre films, the Italians especially, from the American product, often despite the best efforts of Italians to disguise their nationality with pseudonyms for talent. Today you can say pretty definitely that India does films differently from other countries, and in the horror realm you can say that Asian countries take a different approach to the genre despite American efforts to imitate Japanese and Korean successes. But I'm not sure if there's still a distinctively European approach to horror. Today's question is a little more specific: Is there a Norwegian approach to horror?

Is it geographic? I doubt it. It might be natural for director Roar Uthaug to set his film on a snowy mountain, but there are snowy mountains in the U.S., too, and a horror film could easily be set on one. Indeed, Stanley Kubrick did it, and there are times when you think Cold Prey might turn out to be a small-scale model of The Shining. As it turns out, there are no obvious supernatural elements in this story.

Meanwhile, it looks like we have a typically American cast of characters. There are five young people heading out for an outing of snowboarding on a less-travelled mountain. The group consists of three guys, two girls -- two couples and a fifth-wheel, Morten Tobias, who boasts defensively of regular sex with an absent soulmate girlfriend. We suspect they're headed for trouble because the pre-credits sequence showed us a boy being chased through the wintry waste and buried alive. This apparently began a reign of terror in the mountains, with dozens of people disappearing in what proves to be thirty years' time.

Morten proves more of a buzzkill by breaking his ankle on the slopes. The gang looks for a shelter for him and finds an abandoned ski lodge. It hasn't been used in thirty years, and the last guestbook entries refer to a missing boy, as do newspaper clippings the kids find. I should mention that the boy had a very conspicuous birthmark, a patch of discoloration around his left eye. What's the point of that, you wonder?

The gang gets the fireplace going, then finds the generator and restarts the electricity. Apart from Morten, they explore the place, finding broken glass and some fire damage in some of the rooms. While the audience is meant to be apprehensive immediately, Uthaug takes his time with the scares, offering no more than noises and windblown doors for more than half an hour.

At night, one of the couples, Mikal and Ingunn, seem ready to get it on. Uh-oh. But Ingunn won't put out. Now, if you're a lurking killer, there are two ways to look at this. On one hand, Ingunn has preserved her virtue. On the other, she's a tease. How do you judge? Maybe, if you're a psychotic killer, you don't judge at all. You get Ingunn's attention by moving through the hall while she tries a rusty shower, and you wait as she pads into the hall in her scanties, and then you apply the pickax. Ingunn's friends have their music on too loud to hear her screams.

In the morning, not yet knowing Ingunn's fate, Eirik decides to go out to get help for Morten. He finds a trail of blood in the snow. This leads to Ingunn, who serves quite passively as a distraction while the parka-clad killer looms up behind him. Curiously, it looks like he applies the blunt part of the pickax to Eirik.

Inside, the generator conks out. Jannecke, Eirik's girlfriend, and Mikal go down to fix it. After a fake scare involving some tarp falling on Mikal, they find a door into a large closet that reminds them of a lost-and-found department. There's something odd about it, though. The lodge has been closed since 1975, but some of the stuff in the closet is clearly more recent. Mikal mentions a local legend of a "cabin guy" who breaks into places like these and vandalizes them by crapping on the floors. Is this his lair?

Meanwhile, Morten limps into the lodge kitchen to find some food. Jannecke goes to Ingunn's room and finds a pool of blood. Mikal, now looking for Morten, discovers what looks like blood in the kitchen. But Morten had only fallen and spilled a can of food. "I declared war on that tin can and lost," he jokes. But Jannecke's news is no joke. Noticing movement in one of the lodge's long hallways, the three survivors panic and hole up in another room. Mikal finally gets the courage to venture out, only to barely escape a pickax attack. Back to the room, where our heroes have only their bodies to bar the door against the battering of a man with a pickax. But he abruptly quits his siege.

Mikal decides he's getting out at all costs, diving through a window into the snow. As Jannecke and Morten watch, he promptly gets his foot caught in a bear trap. He manages to extract himself in time to dive into a shed when the killer reappears. Inside the shed, he hides behind a pile of skis as the killer enters. Mikal bolts back outside, but the killer catches him as Mikal's friends watch helplessly.

Three down, two to go. They decide the most secure place is the kitchen, and Jannecke leaves Morten there to see if she can break through to civilization. As the killer drags Mikal into the house, she goes into the shed, where she finds skis, a sledge, a flashlight, and a shotgun -- with only one shell available. Now she goes back to the house. Her new idea is to lure the killer someplace where they can lock him up. She blunders upon the spot where the killer has stored Mikal, Ingunn and Eirik -- but Eirik is still alive. Why the killer didn't destroy him at once is a question the film never answers. Unfortunately, Eirik can't get up off the floor, so Janneke has to abandon him when the killer approaches.

New plan: get the killer's attention, bring him out of his closet and blow him away to save Eirik. They get his attention, but he gets a human shield. Jannecke diverts her aim to save Eirik, but that only leaves the killer the honor of putting his pickax through the poor slob from behind. But the killer doesn't necessarily know that that was the heroes' only shot. Morten grabs the gun and tries to bluff the killer, urging Jannecke (whom he's pined for not so secretly) to run for it. Jannecke is soon the Final Girl, but the killer soon catches up with her. As with Eirik initially, he proves strangely inefficient with some of his victims, leaving Jannecke to wake up for a suspenseful final scene surrounded by her friends' corpses while the killer prepares to dispose of them all. We know at least that he's not a cannibal, but what more can we guess about him, and what does it matter in the end?...

Some questions are pretty simply answered, and there's possibly more explanation of some details like the boy's predicament in the pre-credit scene than seems relevant. In the end, Cold Prey's virtue is its relative simplicity. Uthaug gets the kids into an isolated location and puts them in peril. But the killer's inefficiency seems contrived, the only reason not to kill Eirik immediately seeming to be so he'd have the human shield later for a scenario he couldn't have anticipated. There's no good reason at all for him not to finish Janneke off decisively; the reasoning is all the director's, since he wants a tense, dramatic climax -- which it somewhat proves to be despite the contrivance of it all.

The location work gives the film some local color and a relatively unique landscape for a slasher movie. The Anchor Bay DVD includes an English dub, but to be fair to the actors I watched them in their native Norwegian, subtitled. I figured they wouldn't sound like the usual gang of stupid kids that way. As far as I could tell, the actors were competent enough. The effects are bloody rather than gory, the most extreme moment being the pickax coming through Eirik's abdomen. In that regard, Cold Prey is more in the American than the European tradition.

The killer and his pickax are visually distinctive enough to invite exploitation, and the climax points to a backstory for him that begs further questions. The movie ends, however, with an odd moment that makes you question the climax itself, an image of the killer striking that may remind you of the symbolic opening/closing shot of The Great Train Robbery (or maybe the closing shot of Joe Pesci from Goodfellas)or of An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. But the ambiguity of the ending was resolved by the film's popularity at home and presumably elsewhere. So just when you thought it was safe to come down the mountain...