Synopsis
Man on the Roof (Mannen på taket, 1976) is a Swedish crime thriller directed by Bo Widerberg — watch it online on iFILM. The film adapts Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö's seventh Martin Beck novel and takes the police procedural somewhere most genre films of the era avoided.
A police commissioner is found murdered in his hospital bed at Stockholm's Sabbatsberg. His record — brutalizing suspects, grinding down subordinates — left a long line of people with cause to hate him. Detectives Beck (Carl-Gustaf Lindstedt) and Rönn work through the grievances and surface an old wound that never properly healed. Then a heavily armed man climbs to a rooftop above the city, and the film stops being a whodunit.
Sven Wollter's performance as the sniper makes the final standoff genuinely uncomfortable: the film refuses to sort him into villain or victim. Man on the Roof claimed Sweden's Guldbagge Award for Best Film in 1977. Watch it online on iFILM.
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