Tension and paranoia are difficult to capture. That’s probably why it’s a rare commodity in film – or maybe it’s simply because filmmakers don’t have the patience and restraint required to craft something so carefully anymore. Bold statements about the current temperature of moviemaking aside, it’s still both refreshing and horrifying to see the legacy of thrillers done so proudly with this flick. Corridor is Rear Window with sound instead of sight. It’s the story of a young medical student, Frank (Emil Johnsen), who keeps to himself, boarding up inside his apartment to study at night. When a woman named Lotte (Ylva Gallon) moves in upstairs, Frank is drawn into her life and her relationship with an abusive boyfriend. Frank hears the domestic violence through his ceiling and becomes a new target for the boyfriend (played by the always-unnerving Peter Stormare).

I met Death today. We are playing chess. Antonius Block returns from the Crusades and jumps out of the fighting and into the black plague as the flesh-rotting disease hitches a ride all over the beautiful Swedish countryside. On a rocky beach looking out over the water, a cloaked man approaches, introduces himself as Death, and Block challenges him to a game of chess on the condition that a victory will secure his life.

Stiegg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy continues to dominate the New York Times bestsellers lists just as it did across Europe, and the film adaptations are doing brisk business as well. The first film, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (review here), didn’t top the US box-office (it is subtitled after all), but it did very well in limited release. It appeared on DVD and Blu-ray this week and both formats currently sit near the top of the sales charts. The inevitable US remake is still in pre-production and cast speculations run rampant, but for those of us who don’t mind reading while we watch the second film in the Swedish trilogy is about to reach our screens. The Girl Who Played With Fire picks up roughly a year after the conclusion of Dragon Tattoo, and our two leads have gone their separate ways. Once-disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) is back in the saddle both as co-publisher of Millennium Magazine and as occasional sex buddy with his long time magazine partner, Erika Berger. He hasn’t seen the odd and fiercely intelligent Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) for quite some time and is unsure why she left and where she’s gone. For those of you with short-term memory loss, Dragon Tattoo saw Blomkvist convicted of libel and decide to take on a forty year-old missing person case while he awaits sentencing. His investigation crosses paths with Salander and the two join forces and genitals to solve the case and stop a present-day killer.

Foreign Objects travels the world of international cinema each week to look for films worth visiting. So renew your passport, get your shots, and brush up on the local age of legal consent, this week we’re heading to… Sweden!

Cargo takes place, where else, in the future. The Earth is dying and a new planet, called Rhea, has been colonized in the outer regions of space. The problem is that obtaining a visa to travel to Rhea is unbelievably expensive. A young doctor, Laura, agrees to take a job as medic on the cargo ship Kassandra to help fund her passage to the Utopian outland…

Apparently, the guy who directed Cloverfield thinks that Colorado is just as scary as the desolate waste of rural Sweden. Probably just as cold, too.

Foreign Objects travels the world of international cinema each week to look for films worth visiting. So renew your passport, get your shots, and brush up on the local age of legal consent, this week we’re heading to… Sweden!

Roy Andersson raised so much talk with his previous film Songs from the Second Floor that everybody was anxious to get a ticket for his new feature.