While the brooding Scandi-noir of Stieg Larsson's fiction (along with TV hits such as Wallander and The Killing) has long been embraced in UK, it's telling that British publishers were somewhat slow to pick up Jonasson's source novel, a deal being struck only after several million copies had been sold in Europe. One minute, he's attempting to dispose of a deep-frozen body in the dreamily chaotic present the next, he's flashing back to a life in which his undying desire to blow things up saw him killing a neighbour as a child, becoming embroiled in both sides of the Spanish civil war as a young man and casually helping to invent the atom bomb as a fully grown destroyer of worlds.
Pursued by an incompetent motorcycle gang, and variously teaming up with an ageing rogue, an incomplete man and a feisty woman with a pet elephant, Allan follows a trail of unintentional destruction through which the haphazard cataclysms of his past are refracted. Shambling to the nearest bus stop in cork-soled slip-ons, Allan buys a ticket to nowhere, accidentally purloining en route a suitcase full of money. It sounds alienatingly unlikable, but with the backing of Disney distribution, Hundraåringen som klev ut genom fönstret och försvann became a festive Euro-hit last Christmas, giving The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo a run for its money in Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland, and being dubbed "the Scandinavian Intouchables", a reference to the French blockbuster (retitled Untouchable in the UK) which grossed more than $400m worldwide.īased on the bestselling 2009 debut novel by Jonas Jonasson, the wildly whimsical narrative follows the misadventures of Allan Karlsson (Swedish comedy great Robert Gustafsson) who escapes from an old people's home just in time to miss his own centenary birthday party.
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