There are echoes of the Coen brothers and any number of sub-Tarantino ’90s gangster movies in this Scandinavian effort, which still musters a hardheaded charm of its own. Stellan Skarsgård is the unfortunately named Nils Dickman, a snowplow operator in one of the more remote areas of Hoth (aka Norway) and the humble recipient, as the film opens, of the citizen-of-the-year award. When Dickman’s adult son is found dead of an overdose—a coroner’s conclusion that neither he nor his wife can quite believe—the seemingly meek civic worker, on a tip-off, sets about unravelling the plot that led to his death.

In his fourth feature with the actor, starting with 1995’s Zero Kelvin, director Hans Petter Moland makes the most of Skarsgård’s subterranean emotional makeup, sending him into battle with little more than the sad grimace of a man who looks like he’s still very sorry about Nymphomaniac. This works especially well as the increasingly nihilistic Dickman murders his way, with implacable determination, through a narcotics ring governed by the vegan “Count” (Pål Sverre Hagennt, last seen round these parts as Thor Heyerdahl in Kon-Tiki), whose fearsome reputation tends to deflate instantly around a deeply unimpressed ex-wife (Birgitte Hjort Sørensen).

It’s details like that, or the left-field domestic asides between two secretly gay henchmen, that make In Order of Disappearance feel both overfamiliar and oddly welcome (its freshness further aided by crisp, gleaming location photography). Adding to Dickman’s burden is his implied status as a lily-white immigrant, while a discussion between two killers linking northern climates with an efficiently run social democracy points to deeper themes, most of them lost on a distinctly un-Norwegian (but efficiently entertained) film critic.

Eventually, Dickman’s quest triggers a war with a rival gang of Serbians, and so arrives, in the shape of the great Bruno Ganz, another sad father grappling with loss and the means to do violence. Seeing these two actors together, both symbols of a populist international cinema that thrives in the face of Hollywood noisemaking, should be enough to get your bum in the seat.

Georgia Straight, August 2016