This Swedish police crime-thriller is one of those long-forgotten films, but “The Man on the Roof” by Bo Widerberg is a great old-school thriller made under the obvious influence of Friedkin’s “The French Connection”. Unlike the famous Oscar-winning action crime, this is a police crime in a somewhat typical, cold, measured Swedish way. The policemen here are not really prepared for action adventures, but a brutal crime that will turn into something much more terrible, they are trying to solve two inspectors who act as if they are ripe for retirement. After someone in the hospital butchers another old policeman named Stig Nyman with a bayonet right at the beginning of the film, the investigation is taken over by the completely exhausted and seemingly disinterested inspector Einar Rönn and the pragmatic veteran Martin Beck (comedian Carl-Gustav Lindstedt).
Very soon they will realize that the murdered Nyman was known among his colleagues as one of those dirty cops, a guy who abused his power and authority and often brutalized civilians. So even though his colleagues didn’t particularly appreciate and love him, all the complaints against him were covered up and pushed under the carpet so that the public wouldn’t find out about the mistakes of the police, and Beck and Rönn will conclude that the perpetrator could be one of those whom Nyman had once harmed . And it will be proven that he will not be wrong, and that Nyman will not be the only victim that this vigilante decided to punish, but he will place himself with a sniper on the top of a building in the center of Stockholm and target all the policemen who get in his way .
It is a film that, in terms of style and pace, until the second half of the film, when the violence finally escalates, is completely different from similar Hollywood action crime films. “Man on the Roof” reminded me a little of Hitchock’s last film “Frenzy” made only a few years earlier, only that here even more emphasis is placed on showing the police methodology, the procedure by which we understand that the investigators grope in the dark most of the time. Such a brutal and seemingly senseless crime is something they have apparently never faced before and the investigation consists of trial and error, even apathy and frustration as the investigators think they will never find out what happened. Nevertheless, the question will be answered by the end, and “The Man on the Roof” is certainly a thriller that still has its value today.