Scandinavian cinema has always been a little different – rougher, rougher and more radical. Compromises are rarely made. Director Hans Petter Moland has also committed himself to this mentality and sets his deep black comedy “One after the other” bitterly against the pure white snow of Norway. The brutal grotesque is completely unsuitable for cinema enthusiasts with a delicate soul, but for less sensitive viewers who free themselves from any moral shackles, Moland’s bloody inferno is hellish fun. This in turn is not only due to the director’s willingness to ignore the limits of what is reasonable, but also to his unpredictable style of storytelling – with his extravagant mix of ice-cold gangster thriller and family drama, deep black humor and unbridled violence, he adds a particularly edgy example to the series of Nordic cinema oddities that lives up to its unusual title.
The taciturn Swede Nils Dickman (Stellan Skarsgård) lives with his wife Gudrun (Hildegard Riise) in his exiled homeland of Norway and is fully integrated into local life. In the desert of the province, the popular snow plow driver is even named Citizen of the Year. But one day the death of their son Ingvar shakes the Dickmans’ world to its foundations. He dies of a heroin overdose, leaving his parents both dismayed and disbelieving. Nils distrusts the police’s investigation results and finds out on his own that Ingvar was caught between the fronts as a one-time drug courier. Nils begins a campaign of revenge against the drug mafia. He immediately smashes the face of the water carrier Jappe (Jan Gunnar Røise) and beats him to death – but not before the badly mistreated man has spit out another name. But before Nils gets to the suspected responsible mastermind, “The Count” (Pal Sverre Valheim Hagen), there are still a few lights of life to be extinguished. And then there is also the Serbian gangster godfather Papa (Bruno Ganz), who gets involved with his equally squeamish team…
“One by One” is a treacherous film with a built-in trap door. If you don’t know anything about this Norwegian-Swedish-Danish co-production beforehand, the rug will be pulled out from under your feet after the exposure. “Kraftidioten” begins as a bitter drama in which stunned parents face emotional collapse after the mysterious death of their son, but at this point director Hans Petter Moland (“A Man of the World,” “Aberdeen”) makes a gigantic narrative leap and catapults his film at the speed of light into the spheres of laconic, cynical humoresques like “Fargo” or “7 Psychos” – and immediately gives it the blood-toughness of one Revenge à la “96 Hours”: Nils, shaken to the core, hits the gangsters who have his son on his conscience like there is no tomorrow; Like one of his snow plows, he plows his way through the underworld with a stone mine and shows surprising talent as a murderer. Nils is almost bursting with righteous anger and with his charismatic manner, the Swedish star Stellan Skarsgård (“Nymph()maniac”, “The Medicus”) ensures that the audience always remains on the side of this brutal butcher.
Laughter displaces emotion, but that doesn’t make “One by One” light fare, because the humor is bone-dry, brutal and bloody. The massacre takes on increasingly grotesque proportions, but the corpses that Nils produces remain undiscovered for a long time, which screenwriter Kim Fupz Aakeson (“Perfect Sense”, “Grace”) uses to enjoy letting the rowdy gangsters loose on each other, who initially blame each other. The figure cabinet is populated by a whole armada of stereotypical thugs, led by two striking character heads. The pigtailed drug dandy “The Count” is played by Pal Sverre Valheim Hagen (“Kon-Tiki”) as a sensitive psychopath who treats his teenage son like a raw egg, but also polishes his ex-wife’s (Birgitte Hjort Sørensen) face badly when he thinks it’s appropriate. With his distinctive mannerisms, Valheim Hagen teeters on the edge of caricature, but he denies himself the excess. Completely different is Bruno Ganz as the second villain asset. When he enters the scene, “One after the other” knows no stopping. Ganz’s performance as the Serbian gangster boss Papa is ironic to the hilt and beyond – it looks as if his Stasi officer Ernst Jürgen from “Unknown Identity” had been given a good dose of Hitler madness from “Downfall”.
The world that Moland and Aakeson present to us here is definitely out of control. There is hardly any room left for normal human impulses and so the two gay gangster henchmen Aron (Jakob Oftebro) and Geir (Anders Baasmo Christiansen), who kiss each other wildly, let the madness make big prey. At the same time, the wildly humorous and violent deflections also cause some dramaturgical imbalances. It begins with the abrupt genre change at the beginning and ends in the last act, when all the dams break and the laconic revenge thriller grows into a hyperactive violent fable. The coldness of the frozen outside world reflects the emotional rigidity of the characters. Cameraman Philip Øgaard (“Kitchen Stories”) captures the endless barren white expanse of Norway in images that are simultaneously majestic and desolate; the rough, inhospitable landscape defines the scenery and gives the gangster thriller an unusual character – “One after the other” is a truly ice-cold film.
Conclusion: Stellan Skarsgård leaves a devastating trail of blood as a substitute Charles Bronson and director Hans Petter Moland pimps up his brutal black comedy “One by One” into an unrounded but entertaining grotesque.