When snowplough operator Nils’ son is found dead, he refuses to accept the police’s write-off of his death as an overdose. Determined to find out the truth and take revenge on those responsible, he soon becomes embroiled in the murky criminal underworld it transpires his son had nothing to do with. Killing his way up the criminal ladder, his actions draw the attention of the crime boss whose men he is taking out, and who becomes determined to stop the killing whatever the cost.
Norwegian director Hans Petter Moland has a diverse back catalogue of drama with varying themes such as survival, crime, illness, travel, addiction and loss, but it’s dynamics between real people, particularly families, that has always interested him the most. In Order of Disappearance marks the fourth time he has cast Stellan Skarsgård in a lead role, and as usual he doesn’t disappoint.
Swinging between repressed grief and stoic determination, his quest to bring justice to his son’s killers is interrupted only by the reminders of what he has lost. Even though he’s well over 60, he’s still a big guy, and really looks like someone who could conceivably pick fights with gangsters and win. He is also aided in his confrontations by the complacent arrogance of the criminals, who believe that spouting some generic macho threats will be enough to ward him off and thus never have their guard up. Disposing of the bodies in wire mesh and tossing them over a waterfall, he ensures they will never be found.
Moland’s capture of rural Norway is breathtaking. The Arctic tundra glistens in the light of the winter sun, and is marred only by the occasional streak of blood sprayed across the snow. The windswept desolation looks and feels the perfect place for a revenge tragedy to play out, as though the empty setting itself is complicit in the dark deeds carried out within its frozen landscape.
The equilibrium between the violent and comedic aspects of the film is maintained perfectly, with some humour of the grim variety (a cardboard cup holder used as a blood splatter shield or a man asked to step off an expensive carpet before he is executed) and some more lowbrow (the linguistic connotations of Nils’ surname Dickman) lightening moments between the otherwise fairly consistent carnage.
The balance is personified in primary villain the Count, who in a perverse reflection of Nils, flits unpredictably between sinister sadism and almost childlike tantrums. Initially believing the killings to be a power play by the Serbian mafia with whom he shares territory, his impulsive response threatens to start a mob war. As the body count racks up, each death is announced by an intertitle of their name and religion, in order to give each death a marked significance so often lacking in films where the Grim Reaper’s scythe swings almost indiscriminately, almost as if we were watching a lengthy and particularly bleak episode of Six Feet Under.
The climax doesn’t contain quite as many examples of violent and inventive use of heavy machinery that various synopses of the film have otherwise implied, but it’s nevertheless a fitting and final culmination of events.
Overall Verdict: A vengeance film as funny and moving as it is violent and unforgiving, In Order of Disappearance refuses to allow itself to be pigeonholed and is all the more satisfying as a result.
Reviewer: Andrew Marshall