Oslo. Roger Brown works as a headhunter and is married to Diana, who runs an art gallery. In order to compensate for his 5'5 height, Roger steals valuable paintings at private homes by inserting forged copies, with the help of Ove, a security guard who temporarily disables alarms in said homes. Roger meets Clas, a former employee of the Dutch GPS company HOTE, who wants to become the CEO of another GPS company, Pathfinder. Upon stealing a Rubens' painting from Clas' home, Roger finds out he is having an affair with Diana. When Roger finds Ove poisoned, he is hunted by Clas who wants to kill him, and is tracking him via a microscopic GPS tracker inside a hair gel on Roger's hair. Clas wants to steal Pathfinder's technology secrets. Roger shaves his head bald, returns to Ove's house, Clas is there and shoots at him, but since Diana secretly switched his bullets with blanks, there is no effect, and thus Roger shoots back and kills Clas. The police concludes Ove and Clas killed each other, while Roger makes Diana pregnant.
Excellent "Headhunters" is a Scandinavian thriller done the right way: it is not only suspenseful, but also intelligent and sophisticated. It sets up a giant Arukone-style puzzle storyline with a lot of plot points, but all of them are connected into a whole, have a point and purpose, and reach a satisfying conclusion in the end. Most of the kudos goes to the novel by Jo Nesbø, who planned this storyline, and the genius director Morten Tyldum who is able to make the viewers completely forget they are watching a "foreign" Norwegian film and are with time simply engaged and glued to the screen, in a genuine, basic sense for making a story come alive. The brilliant Nikolaj Coster-Waldau stands out in the role of the villain Clas. "Headhunters" start off as a sly heist comedy, but then switches gears and turns into an intense Hitchcockian thriller with bigger stakes involving corporate crime, when the protagonist Roger is being hunted by Clas, with several clever details and plot twists that are totally unexpected.
In one of the most insane situations, Roger hides in an outdoor wooden toilet in the countryside, and is shocked to see Clas coming towards it with his killer dog through the window. He cannot escape. So what does Roger do? He opens the toilet seat and hides inside the underground dump of the pit latrine, holding only a paper tube above the surface, so when Clas enters the wooden toilet, he seemingly doesn't find nobody there. Later, after Clas is gone, in a black-humored moment, Roger cannot start his car, so he simply escapes the farm driving a tractor! The finale is incredible, with a plot twist so clever it is a treat (among other, Roger instructs Diana to exchange Clas' bullets with blanks during their "affair"). On another level, it is a personal story about a man with an inferiority complex who realizes that his worth is not measured in money or success, but in the love of his wife Diana who saves him in the end, in a runabout way, and the thriller story is in the end only used as a therapy for their relationship crisis, which is resolved in a pleasant way. A highlight of Norwegian cinema.
Grade:+++
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