The 100 Year Old Man Who Climbed out the Window and Disappeared
Director: Felix Herngren
Talent: Robert Gustafsson, Iwar Wiklander, David Wiberg, Mia Skäringer
Release Date: 4th July 2014
The titular hundred year old man is Allan Karlsson (Robert Gustafsson), an explosives expert who one day absconds from his retirement home and ventures quite accidentally into the middle of a criminal plot, when he takes possession of a suitcase full of cash belonging to an angry old British gangster played, as ever, by Alan Ford. As Karlsson tries to evade the neo-Nazi hardmen tasked with returning the money, he reminisces — Forrest Gump-like — about a 20th century history in which he has (often accidentally) played a central role.
Herngren handles with skill the comedic aspects of this story, adapted from Jonas Jonasson’s novel, and has an obvious eye for the period detail that makes its flashback sequences so immediately evocative, but it is in the editing booth, and in the creation of a sense of menace in its primary narrative strand, that his film falls down. One finds oneself wishing to stay in its fictional past, rendered so much more vividly than the bland caper that is its present.
Words: Oisín Murphy-Hall
