Later, after a seemingly successful meeting with Pathfinder, an upset Roger flippantly informs Clas that the company may be looking for someone else to fill the position. Roger manages to steal it from Clas' home, but he discovers Diana's cellphone beside Clas' bed.
Despite his misgivings, Roger meets with Ove to work out details on stealing the painting. Roger takes Clas to lunch to discuss the job, and soon learns Clas used to be a member of Pathfinder a special forces unit that specialized in tracking people and winner of the European Military pentathlon. Diana reveals that Clas has asked her to authenticate a lost Rubens painting he inherited that is believed to be worth millions. Roger's wife and art gallery owner, Diana ( Synnøve Macody Lund), introduces him to Clas Greve ( Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), a former executive for GPS tech company HOTE, who wants to work for Pathfinder, for whom Roger is recruiting. Asked to dinner by his mistress, Lotte ( Julie Ølgaard), Roger declines and ends their relationship. It looks like we're playing by Scandi rules nowadays.Roger Brown ( Aksel Hennie), Norway's most successful headhunter, supports his lavish lifestyle by stealing paintings from his clients his partner, Ove ( Eivind Sander), works at a surveillance company and deactivates security at the victims' homes, allowing Roger to swap the art for a counterfeit. It's another feather in the cap of production company Yellow Bird, makers of the Stieg Larsson Millennium movies, as well as the English and Swedish versions of Wallander. The contrast between the chisel-jawed action man Greve and the mousy Brown imparts an odd-couple spin, and there are enough quirks of character and motivation to ensure that any lurking genre clichés are picked off before they get anywhere near centre stage. Headhunters works a treat at a crisp 98 minutes, though if it was any longer the cynical moral vacuum at its core might start to overwhelm it. It turns out that dead men can be persuaded to tell highly persuasive tales.
Yet, though he's crushed and humiliated, Roger isn't quite finished, and ultimately finds enough grit and ingenuity to stage a fight-back. As the plot zigzags violently onwards, Roger is shorn of his girlish curls to reveal a scarred and battered scalp, is mauled by a mastiff, and has to hide from his pursuers by submerging himself in shit and breathing through a cardboard tube (think Slumdog Millionaire, and then some).Īll the while his implacable foe just keeps on coming, and there's even a droll riff on Steven Spielberg's Duel when Greve comes bearing down on his quarry behind the wheel of a giant articulated truck. Roger's frantic quest for survival requires the systematic tearing down of everything he's been so far. The prevailing decorum of the story is ripped away, and the film becomes a hair-raising, and sometimes blackly hilarious, account of Roger's desperate attempts to evade the predatory Greve, who has already bedded his wife and now sets about stealing his life. Roger's attention is fully engaged, but when he pays a clandestine visit to Greve's apartment, it becomes apparent that the headhunter is about to become the headhunted. He's Clas Greve ( Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, pictured below, familiar from HBO's Game of Thrones), who not only has the perfect background as a Special Forces veteran working for a specialist surveillance company, but also happens to possess a fabulously rare Rubens painting. Roger's facade survives intact until he tries to recruit the wrong candidate for a top job with a GPS tracking company. He consoles himself by bonking his significantly lower-rent mistress. She's also very tall, while he, as he uneasily reminds us, measures only 1.68 metres. She wants children, but he's neurotically unable to oblige her. Diana is Roger's Achilles' heel, impossibly desirable and (in his mind) unreachable. His winnings are sunk into his outrageously stylish home, a work of art in itself, and into the new art gallery launched by his beautiful blonde wife, Diana (Synnøve Macody Lund).
Then he slips away and steals their collections, with some assistance from his guns-and-hookers-crazed friend Ove (Elvind Sander, pictured below), thoughtfully replacing the missing masterpieces with forgeries serviceable enough to go unnoticed until long after the trail has cooled. Part of his technique is to quiz his jobseeking candidates on their tastes in art. Yet for all his oily skills, Roger is also living way beyond his means, and has developed a lucrative sideline as an art thief to boost his income.