Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Headhunters
2011 · Morten Tyldum · Headhunters on Sightlines
4 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Look at Roger's house, his art and his breakfast table. (staging)
The rooms are too large, the paintings too conspicuous, the table arranged too symmetrically to eat at. It reads as a stage set rather than a home, which is precisely how it was designed.
Payoff: The production design is a financial statement. This man is a leveraged position with furniture around it.
Watch where Roger sits in the frame beside Greve. (camera)
Aksel Hennie is slight and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau is large, and Tyldum keeps Roger in the bottom third while Greve fills the top. The framing measures the two of them in every scene they share.
Payoff: The composition is the conflict. You can read the power in the room before anybody says anything. In the reading: binomial. The reading calls this the binomial: force set directly against force, the oldest engine the thriller has.
Notice how cool and clean the Oslo scenes look. (light)
John Andreas Andersen grades the corporate lobbies and the big house cold and desaturated, with shallow focus isolating Roger so he looks composed. Warmer, dirtier colors start seeping in later.
Payoff: The film has two color schemes and spends its running time traveling from one to the other.
Watch how much Roger talks and how quickly. (performance)
Hennie plays him articulate, confident and permanently selling: in the office, at home, to himself in the mirror. Coster-Waldau plays Greve laconic and completely at ease.
Payoff: The louder man is the overextended one. The self-inflation is compensation and the film establishes it early. In the reading: le faussaire / the forger. The reading calls Roger a forger: a small man manufacturing a large one and asking everybody to accept the product.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the cold, clean Oslo rooms in the first half hour. Everything in them is staged to look expensive.