Headhunters: Look to Norway for what Hollywood no longer provides — slick, kinky thrills done right
Kick in the Head
by Steve Erickson
Over the past few years, Scandinavian mystery novels have generated the kind of buzz that accumulated around Hong Kong action films in the late '80s and early '90s. Stieg Larsson has earned a posthumous fortune, with more to come from the American remakes of the final two installments in his Millennium trilogy. The next to benefit may be Jo Nesbø, whose serial-killer thriller The Snowman is being filmed by Martin Scorsese — and whose just-filmed best-seller Headhunters is exactly the kind of kinky, devious joyride the movies and readers crave.
Even before Norwegian director Morten Tyldun's screen adaptation, Nesbø's book was getting blurbs comparing it not to other crime novels but to the movies of Quentin Tarantino and the Coen brothers. The cover of the U.S. paperback edition of his 2000 novel The Redbreast quotes USA Today to the effect of, "Reading The Redbreast is like watching a hit movie." It's the kind of blurb usually handed to a potboiler specialist like the American suspense writer Harlan Coben, whose novel Tell No One similarly became an unexpected French arthouse hit.
The most remarkable thing about Nesbø's prose in Headhunters, however, is the voice he constructs for his first-person narrator. His protagonist Roger Brown is simultaneously obnoxious and compelling, not the sympathetic figure you'd expect. While some of the torments he suffers in Headhunters recall Tarantino or the Coens, Roger is closer to a Bret Easton Ellis anti-hero — a charming snake whose confidence is too toxic to resist.
Lars Gudmestad and Ulf Ryberg's screenplay for Headhunters retains that voice, allowing Roger (Aksel Hennie) to narrate. Married to Diana (Synnøve Macody Lund), who runs an art gallery, he works as a recruit of managerial talent for corporations — a job that doesn't pay for his lavish lifestyle. To make ends meet, he steals works of art, often using job interviews to find applicants who own items of value. One of those is Clas Greve (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), a Dutch army vet who owns a rare painting stolen by the Nazis. When Roger breaks into Clas' apartment, he finds an unwelcome surprise that sends his life spiraling out of control.
Both the book and movie take seeming delight in torturing Roger, putting him through several grisly and grueling set pieces, some grotesquely scatological. (Curiously, they're easier to watch than read about.) But while Roger's merely a garden-variety smug jerk, Clas is evil. Once Roger has to fight for his life, our sympathies shift to him almost by default.
It helps that Hennie's looks are striking but not conventionally handsome. If Roger's not as admirable as the usual thriller hero, he's not as assured either: In the opening voiceover, he admits to insecurity about his relatively short height. By stripping him of what physical attractiveness he has — various plot twists leave him contused and head-shaven — the movie peers beneath his surface smarm to find someone we can root for. Headhunters may punish Roger by making his exterior appearance conform to his inner lack of self-esteem, but the end result is that it redeems him.
As with the Larsson books, which were filmed by the same company, Headhunters flirts with outré sexual imagery — naked people firing blanks at each other, amateur porn broadcast to a live audience. At heart, it attempts to be a love story, with the mutually distrusting Diana and Roger moving toward a more complicated relationship, especially once Diana turns into a femme fatale. Even so, the movie's real passion lies in the hatred between Roger and Clas, whose relentless mid-film chase takes up the movie's middle section while Diana remains offscreen. When she returns at the end, her importance to the story is hard to regain. Headhunters is far more invested in the degradation it lovingly depicts than the workings of a mature marriage.
But that goes with the movie's thrill-ride territory. Tyldun delivers the kind of sleek, sharp-edged, nastily entertaining suspenser that major-studio bloat has all but rendered extinct. The movie's nothing more than a brisk diversion, but it's nothing less, either. It's no surprise that the U.S. remake rights to Headhunters were acquired while Tyldun's film was still in production. But in a less xenophobic culture this version of Headhunters would be playing America's multiplexes rather than arthouses — and livening them up.
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