Exit
Director: Peter Lindmark
Writer: Peter Lindmark
Based on: Jesper Kärrbrink and Håkan Ramsin’s novel Dödlig exit
Cast: Mads Mikkelsen, Alexander Skarsgård, Samuel Fröler, Kirsti Eline Torhaug, Börje Ahlstedt, Kristina Törnqvist, Johan Rabaeus, Henrik Noël Olesen
Seen on: 9.12.2025

Plot:
Thomas Skepphult (Mads Mikkelsen) and Wilhelm Rahmberg (Börje Ahlstedt) have been partners in their investment bank for years. They have been successful, partly through strategies they’d rather forget. Now Wilhelm is preparing to hand over all of the business to Thomas and retire. That’s when he is murdered – and Thomas is seen as the one under suspicion. Thomas soon suspects that somebody from their past is actually responsible. Somebody who should be dead but is now threatening his family. So Thomas goes on the run to attempt to clear his name before he can be successfully framed.

I admit I didn’t expect much from Exit, but got drawn in by Mikkelsen and Skarsgård anyway. Unfortunately, they don’t really manage to make more of this film than the pretty standard thriller it is.

Exit is not a particularly bad film, but that doesn’t mean it is all that good either. It gives us pretty much standard fare for the genre, though at the lower end of the spectrum – the man on the run fighting for his family and to clear his name, a final twist that is made to surprise and not to make sense, and a lot of coincidences inbetween. Now, if you like thriller stories, you might be more forgiving of these kinds of things. It is not my genre and so the film falls flat for me in multiple ways.

It was fun, though, I will admit, to watch a film with Skarsgård before he was universally acknowledged as a sex symbol, so he gets to play an awkward guy with an awkward haircut, and I liked this shift in tone. For Mikkelsen, the role seemed less unusual, and I’d say he definitely didn’t give it his best performance either.

There were some nice touches in the relationship between Thomas and his wife Anna (Kirsti Eline Torhaug) that puts this particular part of the story ahead of many Hollywood movies that tread the same ground. While it is still the same old story of a dude having to protect his wife and his daughter from the consequences of his actions that they don’t really know much about, the relationship between Thomas and Anna feels a little more adult than a lot of what we’ve seen so far, with Thomas mostly desperate to communicate with Anna, and Anna having a little faith in her husband.

But yeah, overall it was exactly the kind of film I was looking for – a film I could watch while busy baking cookies and where it didn’t matter much if I turned towards the oven every now and again. Sometimes that’s a nice thing to have, though admittedly, it could have been nicer than Exit.

Summarizing: okay.