In Order of Disappearance

You won’t believe me how much I was looking forward to this film. I even noticed how contradictory the reviews on this website are and I was thinking that I won’t believe it until I watch it myself. So, as soon as Stellan Skarsgard arrived on the scene, a fairly straightforward gangster movie started. His son is killed so he takes revenge. He goes to the first gangster. He beats the information out of him and moves to another. This is how it goes during the whole film. There are sometimes better moments, of course, but overall I was rather falling asleep and this should not be happening in my opinion. Unfortunately, the second The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared didn’t happen. Seen based on the Challenge Tour 2015. (05/03/2015)

When Tarantino made Pulp Fiction in the mid-90s, it wasn't just a blockbuster that collected awards at film festivals. In reality, a new film style was born based on a mix of violence, black humor, slang, cursing, and references to pop culture. In short, the term "Tarantinoesque" was coined. Soon, many imitators emerged, and every significant national film industry and production company came up with their attempt to catch up and surpass him. The market quickly became saturated, and truth be told, very few of those epigones even came close to Tarantino's level. But as you can see, his legacy still lives on, and after 20 years, the trend sparked by Pulp Fiction has reached the cold European north. I am already familiar with and highly appreciate the works of Hans Petter Moland, especially Aberdeen and the underrated Pedersen. However, his style is not a good fit for this kind of film. Creating smart and functional pulp is a skill that requires a relationship with the genre and the ability to balance it meticulously, weighing how far to go with grotesque exaggeration without jeopardizing the tension and dramatic structure of the story. In Pulp Fiction, the audience could laugh at many scenes, but in every moment, they felt genuine fear from the characters, and they were always kept in suspense, uncertain about what would happen in the next second. Moland is no slouch; he offers up an excellent soundtrack, one of the best I've heard in recent years, and the cinematography is also worth praising. It's a pleasure to watch, for example, how the car races through the snowy landscape toward a distant town. However, Moland fails in his inability to turn the gangster characters, who feel like one-time figures, into fully-developed characters, and in the unoriginal script, average dialogues, and the inability to work with the language. There is a plethora of dead bodies that look like they came from some local war, with persistent attempts at comic exaggeration. However, truly effective comedic scenes are few and far between - if it is not enough for you to see a 63-year-old Skarsgard, who might be better known as "Iron Fist," in a moment where he turns human faces into bloody mince. I only laughed sincerely three times - for example, when the Balkan gangsters talked about conditions in Norwegian prisons. Some of the film's characters, like the police officers, are shockingly underutilized, while others, like the mafia boss, are dysfunctional due to excessive overacting. All in all, for me, it's ultimately a 2.5-star film, and it doesn't need a third star from me because In Order of Disappearance will surely find a satisfied audience. Not to mention that I would have to redo a number of ratings for films that I rated with 3 stars, which I find much better than this film. Overall impression: 45%. (10/08/2014)

This is so much better than the remake for the American audience! Skarsgård is determined and natural, the casting and stylisation of the villains are wonderful, the dialogue about European multiculturalism is spot on, with Scandinavian black-humor and the absurdity of escalating the situation into a slaughter over a single incident like something out of a Sam Peckinpah movie. I fully and delightfully enjoyed everything here that didn’t work for me in the remake to the point that I completely missed the creative intent in the effort to give the it a strange distinctiveness. (10/31/2020)

A film that has a great setting and, in the end, quite interesting characters, who clash in a slightly bizarre gang war that culminates in the final scene. There are interesting visual elements used here (such as black windows for farewell), which give the film a touch of originality. Acting-wise, the film does not disappoint. (04/27/2017)

I don't know what went wrong. There's Stellan Skarsgard (who first decides to shoot himself in order to subsequently shoot half the Norwegian mafia), Bruno Ganz as an Albanian mafia boss, and as a bonus, a simple and straightforward story in an appealing and unadorned setting that promises not only an avalanche of corpses, but also a torrent of effective black humour. And though Skarsgard is flawless, the setting is used perfectly and the cinematographer is extremely good with it, the simplicity of the plot reaches such an overwhelming level that the script would have to be littered from top to bottom with jokes or references to famous gangster films to be forgiven as a successful parody. But that’s not the case because, except for a few moments when the corners of my mouth quivered slightly and one that actually made me laugh, the humour is desperately absent, and many plot "twists" that could be tolerated in a comedy seem downright distracting and silly here. For me a wasted potential; a film this formally interesting and with such brilliant performances should have turned out much better. 60% (06/11/2015)