Headhunters (2011) is a Norweigan-Swedish crime thriller
taken from a novel originally written by Jo Nesbo. The screen play was written
by Ulf Ryberg and Lars Gudmestad and directed by Morten Tyldum. The film follows the protagonist Roger Brown
(Aksel Hennie) who is a renowned headhunter but also works as an art thief to
afford all the luxuries for his beautiful wife Diana Brown (Synnove Macody Lund). The film originally starts by making you think it will be a classic heist film but then quickly changes into a thriller/mystery with some parts even coming under the genre of black comedy.
The film starts with Roger
Brown speaking to the audience via a voice over giving some information about
himself. Roger speaks "My name is Roger Brown and I am 1.68m Tall" he
also mention about his wife being tall and we can see that his wife is taller
than him. This demonstrates the main theme than is shown throughout the film
which is insecurity. The main reason Brown steals art is to get money to give
his wife everything she wants and he thinks she would leave him if he couldn’t
give her all this stuff again emphasising his insecurity in himself. Near the
end of the film he learns that his wife would love him no matter what and the
voice over is again used at the end when Brown says “My name is Roger Brown, I
am 1.68m tall and that’s enough” this shows a theme of acceptance as he has
finally accepted who he is and is no longer insecure about himself.
I liked the use of flashbacks
in one scene of the film. It was when Brown realised how he was being tracked
by Clas Greve (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau). He thought back to the meeting he has
with Greve when he speaks of his new liquid tracking device that is impossible
to remove and then he thinks to when he said goodbye to his wife when she came
over and rubbed her hands through his hair. This made the audience believe in
Brown’s insecurities about his wife and put us in the position to believe the
wife is working against Brown. This set the audience up to think that the wife
was one of the antagonists and left us hoping for justice against her for the
rest of the film. However the truth was slowly revealed when Brown arrived at
someone’s house, the only person he thought he could still trust.
Flashbacks are again used at the end when
Brown tells his story of how he was able to defeat Greve which interested me
because it gave you a look into everything that happened whilst we were
following Brown’s story. In this second group of flashbacks it added to the
negative representation of women which is shown between the three female
characters throughout. We found out that with the help of his wife Brown was
able to change Greve’s bullets for blanks but to be able to do this his wife
had to have sex with greve. One of the other female characters is a Russian
prostitute Natasha and the other Lotte is who Brown has an affair with. All
three of these women are shown as sexual objects with their only goal being the
ability to please men. The fact that Diana had to sleep with Greve to get into
his apartment shows what the men wanted the women for. The film is defiantly
male dominated with the men shown to be powerful and this is due to the
dominant ideology.
Overall I really enjoyed the
film I felt it used a plot twist really well and left the audience thinking who
set this up and who is the real antagonist. The small sequences of black comedy
fit into the film really well although the majority of the film had quite a
serious tone. Some scenes were very gruesome and unexpected, but it all added
to the narrative of the film.
