Bent Hamer is a Norwegian film-maker who began his career with quirky absurdist movies in the 00s such as Kitchen Stories and O’Horten, and also his rather tougher film Factotum from 2005 – a fictionalised study of Charles Bukowski starring Matt Dillon. Perhaps Hamer’s career benefited a good deal from international festival juries having a soft spot for his kind of goofy deadpan humour, but I was never entirely sure exactly how funny or meaningful his creations ultimately were. However, his film-making had a certain rigour and poise.
The same, sadly, can’t be said for his new film, set in some featureless anytown in North America, in which a bland young guy called Frank (Pål Sverre Hagen) gets an official position as a “middle man”: someone whose job it is to deliver bad news to people whose relations have been killed. It is a post that leads him into all sorts of difficulties, especially when he delivers bad news to the wrong people.
It is a relentlessly pointless and dull film; nothing funny happens in it and nothing convincingly or sympathetically sad happens either. Frank’s middle-man job is not interesting on any level: it is not plausible in the real world and it doesn’t work as a metaphor. Frank has a romantic life – he forms a relationship with his secretary, Blenda (Tuva Novotny) – but this does not bring the film to life or deepen or enrich the character in any way. There is some interest (but not much) in a cameo for noted Canadian auteur Don McKellar, playing a doctor. The film is an object lesson in what a cul-de-sac quirkiness can be.
• The Middle Man is released on 10 March in UK cinemas.