Film Review: Jackpot

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This article titled “Jackpot – review” was written by Philip French, for The Observer on Saturday 11th August 2012 23.03 UTC

This highly entertaining Scandinavian thriller unfolds in a series of flashbacks after a massacre just before Christmas at a seedy strip joint outside a small town near the border between Norway and Sweden south-west of Oslo. The only survivor, found covered in blood and clutching a gun under the corpse of a blowsy stripper, is Oscar, who manages a small factory employing ex-convicts. As the snow falls, he’s interrogated by the sardonic Norwegian police detective Solør (a splendid performance from Henrik Mestad), who is constantly surprised by finding that Oscar’s wildly unlikely story seems to add up. Funny, outrageous and often surprising, it manages to combine black comedy with convincing police procedural detail and is based on a story by the redoubtable Jo Nesbø, whose novel Headhunters was successfully filmed earlier this year. The chief influences are The Usual Suspects, Fargo and Elmore Leonard, but it has a unique Nordic flavour à la Wallander.

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