The phrase "going postal" has come to mean freaking out, or engaging in fits of bizarre behavior. It's a term that's an unfair generalization about American postal workers but perfectly applicable to Roy (Robert Skjaerstad), the anti-hero of writer-director Pal Sletaune's "Junk Mail," a clever little comedy that heads off in one direction, only to confound our expectations. Roy is exactly the kind of mail carrier no one would want to entrust their letters to. He sees nothing wrong with steaming open potentially interesting envelopes and rifling through the contents, or wandering into unlocked apartments and checking out the furnishings. In addition to being lazy, sloppy and quietly creepy, Roy is also a voyeur who spends his spare time stalking Line (Andrine Saether), a hearing-impaired woman who works at the neighborhood dry cleaners. But just when Roy looks thoroughly repulsive, it turns out there's more to the picture than meets the eye. When he sneaks into Line's apartment to take a mid-day nap while she's at work, Roy learns Line is not quite what he thinks she is. She's got some unsavory secrets of her own. "Junk Mail" comes from Norway, the country famous for giving us the heavy, haunting movies of Ingmar Bergman, but Sleutane's film is much closer to the quirky, underrated comedies Alfred Hitchcock made, such as "The Trouble With Harry" and "The Family Plot." All of the characters are eccentrics, from Roy to Georg (Per Egil Aske), the closest thing to a villain in the story, a derelict who's so nasty he almost throttles an old woman who makes the mistake of weeping in his presence. No one is particularly likable, but everyone is intriguingly quirky and unpredictable. The humor is often broadly played, including a sequence which proves once and for all that karaoke lounges are scary places, no matter what country they're in. What sets "Junk Mail" apart from most American comedies is how much of it takes place in silence, as Roy finds himself in slapstick situations reminiscent of Rowan Atkinson's "Mr. Bean." At one point, Roy is mugged by street thugs trying to steal his mailbag; Roy would gladly give it up, but he gets tangled up in the strap and can't hand it over. For his supposed bravery, Roy is honored by his employers and hailed as a hero. Such twisted circumstances are common in "Junk Mail," which breezes along for 83 minutes and quickly wraps up before Sleutane runs out of twists. James Sanford
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