"In Order of Disappearance" (2014 release from Norway; 115 min.) brings the story of Nils, a Swedish guy longtime resident of northern Norway. As the movie opens, Nils and his wife are getting ready to accept the "Citizen of the Year" award of the local chamber of commerce. Nils, who runs a snow removal equipment business, accepts the award with humility and dignity. In a parallel story line, we see a couple of young men getting kidnapped and one of them eventually dies. It turns out to be Nils' son, who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, getting mixed up in a local drug gang. Nils knows his son was not an addict and decides to look into the circumstances of the death of his son... At this point we are 15 min. into the movie, but to tell you more would spoil your viewing experience, you'll just have to see for yourself how it all plays out.
Couple of comments: this is the latest movie from Norwegian director Hans Petter Moland in which he collaborates with Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgård, who plays Nils. The movie was billed on Google Movie Times as a "comedy" and in a sense it might be one, but a very dark one, if that. I found the movie to be a so(m)ber crime drama, in which Skarsgård plays "Joe Sixpack" who is out for revenge of his son's death. Sure there are chuckles here and there, but to me the film resonates a lot more on the level of how an average guy turns out to be a systematic and determined revenge-seeker. The setting of the film, somewhere in northern Norway, is gorgeous, and the use of the snow blowers and snow removal equipment is almost balletic.
This movie is two years old now, and for some reason just popped up in the theater. I saw it this past weekend at the E Street Landmark Theater in Washington, DC. The matinée screening where I saw this at was attended very nicely. No idea why it has taken this long to get into US theaters, but better late than never I suppose. In the meantime I read somewhere that this movie is going to be remade by Hollywood, but without Skarsgård. Say it ain't so! If you are in the mood for a foreign language crime drama with undertones of a dark, if not black, comedy, you cannot go wrong with this. "In Order of Disappearance" is HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!
