Headhunters (2011)

Roger Brown is Norway's most successful corporate headhunter and, by night, a thief of paintings, a combination he maintains to fund a lifestyle his salary will not cover. The film follows him through a series of escalating disasters involving a former mercenary, a lost Rubens, a tracking gel, and a morgue. At no point does it pause to inform us how we ought to feel about any of this. We are simply asked to keep up.

The cast is uniformly Scandinavian, a fact the film neither explains nor apologizes for. Diana, Roger's wife, runs an art gallery and exercises a certain agency, though the screenplay mostly uses her as a hinge for reversals; there is no thesis here about women in the workplace, just a character who happens to own things. Wealth is present and unflattering, but it registers as one man's vanity, a personal failing with consequences, not a systemic indictment of late capitalism. Nobody delivers a speech. Nobody is redeemed by a realization about society.

The craft is impeccable. Bodies are dropped, revived, dropped again. A man hides his cut hair on a corpse. The film is grisly and twisty and darkly comic, and it earns its pleasures through plot mechanics alone. Watching it now, in an era when even a car chase arrives with a moral attached, there is something almost restful about a thriller that wants only to entertain. It is the highest-grossing Norwegian film in history. The market, apparently, agreed.