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 
Film Vault Suggested Links
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