The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared

Felix Herngren's adaptation of Jonas Jonasson's 2009 novel became the second-highest-grossing Swedish film ever made and took the Guldbagge for Best Film in 2014, along with Best Actor for Robert Gustafsson — who plays Allan Karlsson from his twenties to his hundredth birthday, under prosthetics that earned the film an Academy Award nomination for Makeup and Hairstyling.

The structure alternates between the present, in which a centenarian absconds from his care home and accidentally acquires a biker gang's suitcase, and a picaresque through the twentieth century in which Allan's talent for explosives keeps depositing him beside Franco, Truman, Stalin and a succession of other people who should have known better. Gustafsson, the most popular comedian in Sweden for two decades, plays him as entirely without malice and almost without curiosity, which is the joke.

The comparison everyone reached for was Forrest Gump, and the film is happy to accept it while being considerably darker about what its protagonist actually does. It sold internationally in a way Swedish comedy rarely does — a Swedish-Hungarian-Croatian-Turkish-Danish-Dutch co-production, with 44,000 IMDb votes behind a 7.0 — and it remains the most exportable thing Herngren has made.