Bent Hamer is a Norwegian film-maker who started his profession with quirky absurdist motion pictures within the 00s resembling Kitchen Stories and O’Horten, and in addition his reasonably more durable movie Factotum from 2005 – a fictionalised examine of Charles Bukowski starring Matt Dillon. Maybe Hamer’s profession benefited a great deal from worldwide competition juries having a tender spot for his sort of goofy deadpan humour, however I used to be by no means totally certain precisely how humorous or significant his creations finally have been. Nevertheless, his film-making had a sure rigour and poise.
The identical, sadly, can’t be stated for his new movie, set in some featureless anytown in North America, during which a bland younger man referred to as Frank (Pål Sverre Hagen) will get an official place as a “center man”: somebody whose job it’s to ship dangerous information to individuals whose relations have been killed. It’s a publish that leads him into all kinds of difficulties, particularly when he delivers dangerous information to the unsuitable individuals.
It’s a relentlessly pointless and uninteresting movie; nothing humorous occurs in it and nothing convincingly or sympathetically unhappy occurs both. Frank’s middle-man job just isn’t fascinating on any stage: it isn’t believable in the actual world and it doesn’t work as a metaphor. Frank has a romantic life – he kinds a relationship along with his secretary, Blenda (Tuva Novotny) – however this doesn’t carry the movie to life or deepen or enrich the character in any manner. There’s some curiosity (however not a lot) in a cameo for famous Canadian auteur Don McKellar, taking part in a health care provider. The movie is an object lesson in what a cul-de-sac quirkiness will be.
