The Middle Man

The Middle Man (2021) is a deadpan dark comedy from Norwegian director Bent Hamer — watch it online on iFILM. Frank Farrelli takes a job in the small American town of Karmack: he's been hired as the community's official bearer of bad news. The town has had so much misfortune that it needed someone professional to deliver more of it. As the tagline puts it, death is a hard way to make a living.

Paul Sverre Hagen plays Frank with a bewildered Scandinavian stillness — the kind of performance where you're never sure if the character is quietly falling apart or simply built differently. Tuva Novotny and Aksell Hennie round out the cast. Hamer, known for Kitchen Stories and O'Horten, works in the same register here: absurdist, unhurried, oddly tender. A Norwegian-Canadian-German-Danish co-production running 95 minutes.

Stream The Middle Man online on iFILM — one of those films where the bleakness is actually the warmth, once you adjust.