In Order of Disappearance (2014)

Star – Stellan Skarsgård

Genre – Crime > Thriller > Black comedy

Run Time – 1 hr 56 minutes

Certificate – 18

Country – Norway

Awards – 3 Wins & 10 Nominations

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Now here is a cracking crime thriller from Scandinavia that’s both funny, races along and not at all gratuitous, very much not the norm for the Scando Crime genre we see everywhere today in the celebrated film and TV from that part of the world. It’s normally two hours of moody and booze sodden detectives and angst and a mutilated women or two along the way but not this time. Yes, In Order of Disappearance has some of that ingredient but not your regular stuff from the snowy fiords.

Its stars Stellan Skarsgård, the Brendan Gleeson of Scandinavian film, and a black comic version of Liam Neeson’s brilliant Taken. Who didn’t love that movie! Norwegian locations and the like are so evocative to the crime genre so why not have drugs gang war raging up there with the elk, pines and blizzards, the so called ‘red snow’ genre.

===Cast===

• Stellan Skarsgård as Nils Dickman
• Pål Sverre Valheim Hagen as Ole Forsby (“Greven”)
• Bruno Ganz as Papa
• Birgitte Hjort Sørensen as Marit
• Peter Andersson as Egil Dickman (“Wingman”)
• Kristofer Hivju as Stig Erik Smith (“Strike”)
• Jan Gunnar Røise as Jan Petter Eriksen (“Jappe”)
• Jakob Oftebro as Aron Horowitz (“Junior”)
• Tobias Santelmann as Finn Heimdahl
• Jon Øigarden as Karsten Petterson
• Miodrag Krstović as Dragomir Bogdanović
• Sergej Trifunovic as Nebojsa Mihajlović
• Anders Baasmo Christiansen as Geir
• Stig Henrik Hoff as experienced police officer
• Goran Navojec as Stojan Micić
• David Sakurai as Takashi Claus Nielsen (“Kineseren”)
• Atle Antonsen as Reddersen

===Plot===

In the wintry Norwegian mountains a small regional airport is being used to import drugs by the Croatian mafia. Geir, an airport worker (Anders Baasmo Christiansen), is paid off to insure it goes through without any issues so a courier can pick it up and drive away. But he gets greedy and tries to scrape some off the top, resulting him and an innocent baggage worker, Stug (Atle Antonsen), being bundled into a car to be killed in the icy sticks. Geir escapes at the last but Stug is given a fatal overdose of heroin and dumped on a bench in the city to be just another statistic.

Stug is the son of the lugubrious Nils Dickman (Stellan Skarsgård), a local snow plough driver, who often clears the airport runways. He is not best pleased of the news of his son’s death, especially when the cops say they won’t investigate it. Nils and his wife no full well the kid never touched drugs.

Geir, bloodied and beaten, hides out at the airport where her runs into Nils late at night, the broken snowplough man with a rifle butt in his mouth about to blow his brains out. Geir, wrapped with guilt, tells him what happened. Nils, now seething with anger, turns the rifle around and intends to conduct his own investigation from now on in and it’s not going to be pretty. Geir gives him a name, Jappe (Petter Eriksen), as Nils sets off on his rampage in downtown Oslo to pick off his sons killers one-by-one, working his way up the chain to kingpin Graven (Pål Sverre Valheim) as the body count rises, inadvertently starting a drug war with the Albanians in the process.

<a href="http://moviehooker.com/movies/moviehookers-netflix-pick-of-the-week-in-order-of-disappearance/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Source</a>

=Quote=

Greven: “One man can disappear, two men can disappear, but three men cannot f*cking disappear without someone making them disappear”

===Results===

I really enjoyed this and you can’t help but cheer as vengeful dad Stellan Skarsgård takes out the bad guys with any method he deems fit with righteous anger, bearing in mind he owns a snow plough. The red snow genre phrase is very fitting. He is great fun here as he puts down the pony tailed Slavs with his fists, dark humor and old hunting rifle.

This is very much a guy’s movie, the characters and for the audience, funny, brutal, edgy and pacey. It has no intentions of getting bogged down in character building and that dark soul Scando stuff and quickly into the killing, Taken style. Liam Neeson would raise an eyebrow or two at some o the dismissals.

It’s definitely one to seek out on DVD or TV and I guarantee you will enjoy it, however far-fetched some of it is. It’s never really explained where Nils gets his hardman skills from but who cares! There is something about the enigmatic nature of Scandinavian locations and the silent atmosphere it creates that makes these films so watchable.

===RATINGS===

Imdb.com – 7.2/10.0 (16.234votes)

Rottentomatos.com – 85% critic’s approval

Metacritic.com – 74% critic’s approval

===Trailer===

===Critics===

New York Times –‘A delicious Norwegian film full of icy landscapes and icier hearts’.

The Times –‘A Scandinavian splattefest staining the snow-capped mountainsides of an otherwise-breathtaking Norwegian wonderland!

Washington Post –‘ What saves it, paradoxically – even, at times, delightfully – from skidding off course into cliche is the profound appeal of its middle-of-the-road, but never dull, protagonist.’

Saloom.com –‘Moland possesses the rare ability to take a story where the viewer knows almost exactly what will happen and make it surprising’.

Los Angeles Times –‘An absorbing and atmospheric entry in what we might as well term the “red snow” genre’.

The Mail –‘This taut, often hilarious, thriller is a stellar example of why Scandinavian cinema continues to impress’.