The first time Nils (Stellan Skarsgaard) puts on a suit, it’s to receive a Citizen of the Year award; the second, for his son’s funeral. And the snowbound little town of Tyos will never be the same.
The local community would like him to run for office, even though Nils is an immigrant to Norway (“the good kind,” one man is quick to add).
Nils is responsible for keeping the snowy pass road into town open. He likens himself to a pathfinder, even if he does traverse the “same path over and over.” With equal single-mindedness, Nils refuses to accept the police conclusion that his son’s death was the result of a drug overdose, especially after a bloodied man shows up in his garage.
He’s right, of course. Nils’s boy unwittingly interfered in a drug transaction ultimately overseen by local druglord “The Count” (Pal Sverre Hagen). Hell hath no fury like a father wronged: Nils starts at the bottom in his quest for information, working his way up and igniting a revenge-war between the Norwegians and rival Serbian drug dealers led by “Papa” (the inimitable Bruno Ganz) in the process.
“A father must avenge his son,” says Nils.
“When did you become Dirty Harry?” quips a man known as Wingman (Peter Andersson), who has more in common with Nils than first glimpsed.
Nils’s wife leaves him. The body count piles up. A tasteful memorial screen pops up every time someone buys the farm.
Interspersed with all the violence are domestic scenes of The Count as an inadequate parent to his young son, squabbling with his ex-wife (Birgitte Hjort Sorensen, Pitch Perfect 2) and relegating much of the care-giving to his stable of body guards.
Director Hans Petter Moland, working from a screenplay by Kim Fupz Aakeson (Perfect Sense), makes all of his peripheral characters memorable. Two bodyguards share an illicit passion; criminals debate whether the welfare state is responsible for all the snow; the Serbs sing en route to a kidnapping.
And Nils’s adeptness at interrogation and making people disappear — including a clever use of chicken wire — lead us to suspect that this might not be his first go-round with the underworld. Maybe his solitary job in a foreign land was not by accident?
The perspectives are magical: the lonely view from an airport runway, the epic waves of snow created by Nils’s snow-blowing equipment, Nils’s biblical site for body disposal. We never see the earth, even during a funeral, but cinematographer Philip Ogaard keeps the snowscape lively. The film was nominated for a Golden Bear in Berlin.
Darkly comic and bloody to the last frame, In Order of Disappearance is a frigid fable about the consequences of violence and the moral perils of revenge. But mostly it’s silly, savage fun.
In Order of Disappearance opens Friday at Vancity.
