With his brilliant antagonist at his heels, Roger goes on the run.
Edgar Allan Poe's story "A Descent Into the Maelström", you may recall, is set in Norway, and its narrator, caught in the giant whirlpool, saved himself by carefully observing his predicament and working out an escape route.
As he goes mano a mano with Roger across Oslo and around the magnificent surrounding countryside, our sympathies gradually shift to his desperate but increasingly resourceful quarry, who attempts to stay alive by understanding his complex position. He's a trained special forces operator with experience gathered around the world, as well as something close to the devil incarnate, a man with no morals and no capacity for empathy. Roger seeks him out for Pathfinder, a conglomerate run from Oslo, and sees him as a target for theft as he secretly owns a valuable Rubens that apparently came into the family's hands by way of Nazi confiscation during the second world war. Greve is a handsome, wealthy, charismatic son of a Dutch father and a Norwegian mother, apparently between jobs, having recently worked for a major military contractor. However, a malevolent fate comes up the Kattegat in the form of Clas Greve (leading Danish actor Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) to pursue the complacent, hubristic antihero.
He is more like Patricia Highsmith's psychopathic antihero Tom Ripley than Raffles, EW Hornung's gentleman thief. Roger is not particularly likable and his vicious world of international commerce is unattractive, though it glitters in a Mad Men way. He then proceeds with a poised wit to demonstrate his manipulative gifts by bending a client to his will while extracting the information he needs to steal a valuable lithograph of Edvard Munch's The Brooch. His headhunting enables him to case the careers and homes of rich, middle-class applicants who own valuable paintings.ĭuring the opening credits, Roger's no-nonsense voiceover explains the five rules of art theft. Between the two activities there is what Roger and his business associates would call synergy. More significantly, to pay for his extravagance, he has a lucrative sideline in stealing works of art with the assistance of a cheerful crook employed by a security firm. Roger has a highly paid job as a headhunter, recruiting senior managerial talent for leading international corporations. Topically, her favourite artist (in the novel at least) is Damien Hirst. She's high maintenance, partly because of her clothes but mainly because Roger subsidises the fashionable Oslo art gallery she runs and has installed her in the modernist house he feels is her due. Headhunters is narrated by the suave, secretive, deeply self-conscious business executive Roger Brown (Aksel Hennie), who is nearly as proud of his fine head of hair as he is of his trophy wife, Diana (Synnøve Macody Lund), a beautiful Amazonian blonde several inches taller than him and with a degree in art history. Nesbø's other books feature tough, hard-drinking Oslo police inspector Harry Hole (pronounced "Hurler"). The film is adapted from a novel by Jo Nesbø, the Norwegian crime writer who is now up there beside the Swedes Henning Mankell and Stieg Larsson, and the screenplay is the work of Lars Gudmestad and Ulf Ryberg, old hands at this kind of thing, the latter having adapted novels by both Mankell and Larsson. They'll have trouble in making a movie half as good or half as authentic.Īlthough inevitably indebted to American models, Headhunters is firmly rooted in the Scandinavian experience, and it moves with the speed of a demented lemming heading for the cliff-edge of a fjord. An American company acquired the rights to remake Morten Tyldum's Headhunters while it was still in production. T he cinema, as Karl Marx might have said, repeats itself, first as a Scandinavian thriller, then as a Hollywood remake.