Headhunters

Morten Tyldum's Headhunters (Hodejegerne) opened in 2011 and became the highest-grossing Norwegian film of all time on its domestic release, a record it held for several years. The film consolidated Tyldum, after his earlier Buddy (2003) and Fallen Angels (2008), as the most internationally recognised commercial Norwegian director of his generation; the success of Headhunters led directly to his Hollywood career and his subsequent The Imitation Game (2014), which won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.

Adapted from Jo Nesbø's 2008 novel of the same name (Nesbø, of Harry Hole fame, having become one of the most internationally exported Norwegian crime novelists of the 2000s), the film follows Roger Brown (Aksel Hennie), Norway's most successful corporate headhunter, a slight, balding, wealthy man widely envied for his elegant wife (Synnøve Macody Lund). Roger's secret second life is as an art thief; he uses his job-interview position to learn which of his executive interviewees own valuable art collections. When he targets a former mercenary named Clas Greve (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, in a key role just before Game of Thrones) who owns a priceless Rubens, the heist begins to spiral into something far more violent than Roger's usual professional methodology.

The film operates as a propulsive, darkly comic Scandinavian thriller in the lineage of Stieg Larsson and Nesbø. Hennie's central performance, John Andreas Andersen's photography of corporate Oslo and rural-forest exteriors, and the film's sustained black-comic register combined into one of the most internationally exported Nordic genre productions of its decade.