UK Release Date: 06-04-2012
Starring: Aksel Hennie, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau
UK Certificate: 15
Director: Morten Tyldum
Country: Norway
Distributor: Momentum Pictures

For anyone not familiar with Norwegian writer Jo Nesbø, his Harry Hole thrillers have inevitably been compared to that Scandinavian phenomenon from Denmark that is the late Stieg Larsson. A comparison that while it might do no harm to book sales, must jar with a man who has been successful enough in his own right to be able to hold back on allowing his greatest creation, the hardbolied, hard-drinking Oslo detective Hole to be realised on screen. Martin Scorcese, no less, has recently signed up to direct The Snowman with Nesbø having the final say in the matter.

However, it is Headhunters that Nesbø has allowed to be brought to the big screen first. It is a stand-alone tale about Roger Brown (Aksel Hennie) an amoral corporate headhunter (is there any other kind?!) with a sideline in art theft. A compulsion driven by his desire to fund a lavish lifestyle for his ethereally beautiful, tall, blond, athletic, art gallery-owning wife, Diana (Synnøve Macody Lund). Roger has plenty of chips on his diminutive sholulders, one of them being the fact that he has managed to bag such a beautiful woman and he thinks that only by feeding her with luxury will he hang onto her. Another chip to deal with is the constant stream of high fliers he interviews on behalf of Fortune 500 companies, many of them tall, successful, athletic men, whose looming shadows it is Roger's mission to overcome by manipulating their futures in the interview room. Roger also has a mistress and true to his name services her when the fancy suits him. But his luck runs out when he crosses a former mercenary, Clas Greve (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau). Irked by Clas's flirting with his wife at a gallery opening he subsequently sabotages Clas's chances of a job he has set up for him and at the same time steals a rare artwork Clas owns. Roger soon wishes that he hadn't even met Clas and comes to learn the more primal meaning of the word 'headhunter' in what, beginning as a sort of 'Thomas Krone Affair' caper, is transformed into a harrowing cat-and-mouse pursuit thriller.

Director Morten Tyldum must have heard that Scorcese was following in his footsteps and had to raise his game. He does, directing what is essentially a visceral chase film of superior pace and quality in which moments of nerve-jangling tension are torn apart by explosive action, shot through with as much mordant humour as bullets. When Roger is attacked by a savage guard dog in a barn you can't help laugh at the horror as it unfurls before you. And let's not even begin to go into detail with that outhouse scene, in which Roger plays out in foul reality the metaphor of being 'right in the shit'.

What begins as a sardonic crime caper with a slick and unsympathetic amoral main protagonist soon turns into a nightmarish ordeal for our would-be Napoleon. Being able to pull off situations which are at once horrific and gruesome yet at the same time farcical, evoking involuntary mirth amid it all - you will laugh at the idemise of man's best friend - is no mean feat and this is just one quality that raises Tyldum's Headhunters well, head and shoulders above the production line of bank-rolled cookie cutter thrillers that must have seemed to be a good idea to enough people at the time of their pitch in Hollywood. (Guess what, there is already a U.S. remake of Headhunters in the pipeline.)

Go and see this one first. For all us little islanders off the mainland of Europe know, to Norwegians this film is one long snorefest, with OTT antics from the actors, but I doubt it. Hennie's performance as the smug and repellent Roger is as nuanced as it is animated, so accomplished that we can't help rooting for and, damn it, liking Roger as one torment after another is heaped upon him. Coster Waldau creates in Clas a cold-eyed charmer of a killer. The twist and turns of the plot come at you like a bunch of hurled snakes and at one point you don't know who can trust who, they're an amoral lot! The scene with a couple of fat, inadvertently life-saving twin brother policemen is ludicrously funny. What it does as a thriller, sardonic humour and all is exactly that: thrill. There will be few if any thrillers with more compulsive forward momentum than Headhunters on release this year. Go and see this one while you can, if you can find it on the schedules in your nearest multiplex before you have to wade your way through all the inevitable remakes of other Scandinavian thrillers on the way.