THE “last will” of the title of this Swedish thriller is that of Alfred Nobel. In the ballroom at the banquet following the Nobel Prize medicine awards, the woman chair of the selection committee is shot dead just a couple of steps in front of reporter Annika (Malin Crepin) and the winner (for stem cell research) is wounded.

The cops and the media suspect that it was an in-principle protest against the research. Annika, writing a backgrounder about the dead woman’s private and professional life, begins to wonder whether everybody else is following a dead-end trail.

That’s the intro to a thriller with careful plotting, good pace, conflicts not hurrying to expose themselves and tensions not letting go after their causes pass.

Annika, whom Liza Markland created a decade ago for TV, is in real danger. The real villain is not the yellow-eyed professional hit-girl Kitten performing a train of murders, but her unidentified male employer.

The film’s device of women as hero (in the most real sense) and overt villain is effective. I also liked director Peter Flinth’s use of IT in a real-life manner, social networking as an important management tool transcending exchanges of irrelevant information from people with ill-informed opinions to others lacking the skill to read between the lines.

At Greater Union