In Order of Disappearance (2014)

In Order of Disappearance arrives from Norway in 2014 with snow, a plow, and a grievance. Stellan Skarsgård plays Nils Dickman, citizen of the year, whose son turns up dead of a heroin overdose that the police decline to investigate. Nils investigates instead, and the film proceeds as a black comedy of escalating gangland slaughter, Serbian dealers on one side, a fastidious crime lord called the Count on the other. Hans Petter Moland directs with a flat, cold-eyed calm, letting the bodies accumulate while the landscape stays white and indifferent. It is a revenge picture with a dry sense of humor and no interest in instructing anyone.

The cast is Scandinavian to its bones, with a Serbian mafia family and a Danish-Japanese contract killer known as the Chinaman filling out the roster. These are genre archetypes, stocked the way a western stocks its saloons. No casting gesture is being made, and none is needed. The Count's veganism supplies a recurring joke about his diet and his temper, not a statement about bodies or ethics. There is no romantic subplot of note, no ethnic commentary, no environmental allegory hiding in the snowdrifts, and no character pauses mid-kidnapping to explain how the audience ought to feel about any of it.

The film is content to be a film. It kills its characters in order, as promised by the title, and it ends with two grieving fathers driving off in the same car, satisfied. The whole enterprise sits comfortably outside the cultural conversation of its moment, and it has aged without acquiring any new significance. A remake followed in 2019. That is the entire arc of its social ambition.