Streaming on SBS on Demand - IN ORDER OF DISAPPEARANCE (Hans Petter Moland, Norway, 2014)

Twenty five years ago Hans Petter Moland attracted attention with Zero Kelvin. It starred Stellan Skarsgård. It was the first of a number of collaborations between the two, one of which was In Order of Disappearance made in Norway in 2014. Moland remade the film in America with Liam Neeson and it went out around the world in February this year. I didn’t see it.

But, its precursor is now streaming on SBS On Demand. When I watched it had 3 ad breaks of around a minute each, far fewer interruptions than you get when you watch an episode of Spiral on the same service.

Skarsgård plays a Swede living in the backblocks of Norway whose job it is to drive a snowplough to keep a main road open. The vehicle almost resembles something out of Mad Max. He’s so integral to the town that he’s just had an evening out to accept an award for citizen of the year. That night his son, who drives the freight trolley at the local airport, is murdered via an overdose of heroin. The police close the case but Skarsgård is suspicious. His wife accepts the police version of a drug overdose and Skarsgård himself gets so depressed he contemplates suicide until a friend of his son, and a drug dealer, turns up to tell him that his kid was murdered. 

Skarsgård’s wife leaves him and he sets out on a course of bloody revenge. It has taken about half an hour to get to this point, which includes a couple of early revenge murders on low level drug couriers. So far so Scandi noir…. 

Then the complications start to ensue and the film turns away from grim brutality into a dramatic comedy of mishap, misunderstanding and misadventure. The drug community thinks it knows who is breaking the rules. By ‘chance’ Skarsgård’s brother is a reformed crim who knows the ins and outs of the local drug trade. His Chinese girlfriend is not happy. The drug kingpin’s ex-wife, the scrumptious Birgitte Hjort Sorensen (from Borgen), is not impressed with her child’s welfare when he’s in the care of the drug kingpin. A bunch of Serbs, ruled over by an aging Bruno Ganz, who had previously kept to their patch, object to one of their members being offed. The crosses mount up to signify chapter endings. There are a couple of dozen by the end…

It’s almost into Donald Westlake territory and makes you chortle quite a lot…I’m curious enough now to want to see the Moland/Neeson/US remake.