If
revenge is a dish best served cold, then provincial Norway is the perfect place for it. Technically, Nils Dickman is Swedish and he will serve up
payback with Ikea-like efficiency in Hans Petter Moland’s comic noir In Order of Disappearance (trailer here), which screens
during the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival.
Dickman
(yes, there are comments made regarding his surname) is not a gangster, he is a
snowplow driver, but he becomes a very put-out snowplow driver when his son is
murdered by a drug gang. Maybe it is in his blood. His older brother was once a
gangster, nick-named “Wingman” in honor of Top
Gun. Dickman’s anger and initiative are sufficient to ice the low level
lackeys who administered his son’s fake overdose, but he will need some help
getting to their boss, a legacy kingpin known as “The Count.” As Dickman works
his way up the food chain, The Count responds by igniting a gang war with the
Serbian mob he assumes is responsible for his underlings’ disappearances.
For
some reason, Tribeca programmers have a soft spot for films about snowplow
drivers. Even though Emanuel Hoss-Desmarais’s Whitewash won last year’s best new narrative director award, Disappearance is the film to see.
Screenwriter Kim Fupz Aakeson (who also wrote the radically different Perfect Sense) neatly balances moody
revenge drama (in the tradition of the original Death Wish) with generous helpings of dry, black comedy. In fact,
there is a running visual gag that gets funnier and funnier through repetition.
On
the other hand, Stellan Skarsgård plays it scrupulously straight as Dickman. He
is about as Nordic as a vigilante can get. Despite his severe reserve, viewers
get a sense he is so tightly wound, he might shatter if he tipped over. It
takes a couple beats to realize the ever-reliable Bruno Ganz appears as the
grieving Serbian godfather (known simply as Papa), but his sly turn adds the
icing to this frozen ice-cream cake.
