In Order of Disappearance

Hans Petter Moland's In Order of Disappearance (Kraftidioten) premiered in the main competition of the Berlinale in 2014. By that point Moland — a Norwegian director who had moved between his home country, the United States and Sweden since the early 1990s — had built a steady festival reputation with Aberdeen (2000) and A Somewhat Gentle Man (2010), the latter also a Berlinale title. Kraftidioten was the fourth feature collaboration between Moland and Stellan Skarsgård, by then one of Sweden's most internationally recognisable actors.

The film opens on Nils Dickman (Skarsgård), a Swedish-born snowplough operator working the alpine roads of northern Norway, accepting a citizen-of-the-year award from his small community on the same day he learns his adult son has been found dead of an apparent heroin overdose. Nils refuses to believe the verdict and begins moving methodically up the supply chain. The film stages this premise in a deadpan Nordic-comedy register, the white-on-white snowscape photographed by Philip Øgaard turning every encounter into a graphic composition. The supporting cast is strong: Bruno Ganz, in one of his late screen roles, plays a Serbian crime patriarch; Pål Sverre Hagen, fresh off Kon-Tiki, is the vegan, smoothie-drinking, joint-custody-negotiating drug kingpin known as The Count; Kristofer Hivju turns up as a henchman.

Critical reception was strong (86% on Rotten Tomatoes; admiring notices in Variety and the Guardian) and the film became a cornerstone of the mid-2010s Scandinavian crime-comedy wave alongside Headhunters and The Hunt. Moland and Skarsgård remade it themselves in 2019 as Cold Pursuit, with Liam Neeson stepping into the snowplough — a rare instance of a European auteur retelling his own film for Hollywood with the same director attached.