Junk Mail

Nashville Scene

DIRECTED BY: Pål Sletaune

REVIEWED: 08-24-98

Roy (Robert Skjaerstad), the hero of a gleefully perverse comic thriller from Norway called Junk Mail, has the ultimate job for a ceaseless voyeur: He's a postman. Not a good one, though. Most days he carries his heavy bags into a train tunnel--where he dumps their contents into a hole. When that fails to rouse him from his stupor, he steams open the letters. Then he graduates to entering apartments and spying on the residents. He's especially fond of the deaf girl, Lina (Andrine Saether), whom he sees shoplifting records from a local store. But she has secrets he wasn't meant to know--and soon the postman is fleeing a vicious thug who wants him canceled for good.

The premise riffs on a classic Hitchcock/De Palma setup: the morally compromised peeper who stumbles onto something too queasy even for him. The director, Pal Sletaune, has fun confronting Roy with situations that pique our prurient curiosity--which Roy as often as not acts on for us. (The movie can be taken as a good joke on its audience, since our stand-in is a socially inept geek who wolfs spaghetti out of a can.) More entertaining than the familiar suspense plotting, though, is the movie's portrait of underground Oslo, which teems with karaoke nuts, sloshed barflies, and itchy hooligans. And Roy's motley coworkers are a hoot: Their daft irritability suggests that Scandinavia has its own equivalent of going postal. Junk Mail shows through next Thursday at the Watkins Belcourt; it's a welcome delivery indeed.

--Jim Ridley

Capsule Reviews
Junk Mail
Junk Mail
Junk Mail
Junk Mail

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