Critic Reviews

A transgenre thriller that glides effortlessly from crisp social commentary through off-kilter comedy to paranoid terror, it's on my short list of the most enjoyable movies in recent memory.

Headhunters is a dark adult entertainment, a wild and bloody adrenaline rush of a movie that deals in gleeful grotesqueness and over-the-top implausibilities.

It's not often a thriller keeps me wound up as well as Headhunters did. I knew I was being manipulated and didn't care. It was a pleasure to see how well it was being done.

The film has some fairly grisly violence, but also considerable humor and the sort of intricate, thought-through storytelling you'd expect from Hitchcock or the Coen brothers.

Headhunters' title rapidly turns literal, and what seemed like a lightweight heist thriller careens into a bloody-minded game of cat and mouse.

A slick thriller which takes place in a moral vacuum. It's fascinating rather than exciting, but makes for chilly thrills with two strong, charismatic lead performances, a great deal of style and amusingly repulsive, ruthless twists.

A nice blend of Scandinavian sophistication and Hollywood slickness, Headhunters is an entertaining Nordic noir achievement – and sure to be tagged as this year's "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo."

The compact Hennie is a wonderful actor, smoothly congenial when confident, uproarious when rattled. And he will be rattled-as well as stabbed, shorn, bitten, mangled, and worse.

Though the film wraps up its spinning-plates narrative a little too neatly, this is still a Scandi-noir to die for.

Headhunters is admirably swift in style, and dangerously silly in what it begs us to swallow, but at its heart is a consummate depiction of a permanent type - the proud and prickly male, thrown back on his desperate wits. Small may not be beautiful, but it lives.