Even in Cold Case Hammarskjöld, in which Brügger tamely appears as himself – a film-maker smelling conspiracy behind the death of Dag Hammarskjöld, the UN secretary general, in a 1961 plane crash – he cannot resist a splash of play-acting. He wears an all-white outfit, down to his sneakers, because, as he says in his narration: “I know for a fact that the villain of this story, he wore only white.” Brügger fails to prove that this villain – a long-dead South African mercenary – actually brought down Hammarskjöld’s plane, but that kind of factfinding is, in any case, never the priority of his films. “Hammarskjöld was a ticket to all the things I really enjoy: tracking down mercenaries, telling tales of evil men who dress in white, [and] rumours about secret African societies,” Brügger says in one voiceover. He’s always out for spectacle, shock and a wild ride. “If Hunter S Thompson had gone into film and ditched all the drugs,” a Norwegian columnist wrote of Cold Case Hammarskjöld, “maybe this is what he could have ended up with.”
