The lives of others are an open book for Douglas. The squat, beefy man works for the intelligence service and believes that status gives him the right to stalk, badger, and bully other people, both in their professions and their private lives … State constraints as a tool for repression of the individual is a central motif in almost all of Pål Bang-Hansen’s films. But although the director usually takes up the point of view of the victim, in “Douglas” he gives us a perpetrator. His satirical portrait of an overreaching secret agent is a pointed denouncement of misdirected power and, at the same time, a warning against a slide into a surveillance state. The look of the film, with its dingy, gritty images is a reflection of the grubby enterprises its protagonist practices. Because of a few “obscenities” scattered throughout the film, the only version of “Douglas” released in Norway was cut by 22 seconds.