- Finally, a film that appreciates the evils of daylight. Now that I live north of the 45th parallel, I must admit that I occasionally find summers a bit taxing. Sure, the weather is great, but aren't 16 hours of brightness too much? Go north of the arctic circle and things get a lot worse. In Erik Skjoldbjærg's Insomnia, the unrelenting sunlight is just one of many things to haunt detective Jonas Engström (Stellan Skarsgård) on his trip to northern Norway. He and his partner Erik Vik (Sverre Anker Ousdal) are there to solve the brutal murder of a high school girl named Tanja (Maria Mathiesen). Rumors abound that Engström left the Swedish police after getting in trouble with a female witness in one of his cases, but his partner probably wouldn't remember the details of such an event even if it had occurred.
- Their investigation leads them to a small fishing cabin where the killing must have taken place. On a particularly foggy day, they set up a stakeout and wait for the murderer to take the bait. Sure enough, a solitary figure comes investigating but quickly vanishes in the fog when the police give chase. Suddenly all that daylight becomes much less helpful after getting diffused through a thick layer of fog. A shot rings out, and Engström comes running through the mist. He fires the next shot from his Swedish-made pistol, but hits someone other than whom he expects. Now the police have two dead bodies, and Engström is content to attribute them to the same killer.
- Trouble is, there were actually two witnesses to that last killing. As the investigation closes in on a smarmy crime writer named Holt (Bjørn Floberg), Holt reveals to Engström that he actually had a pretty good view of the detective's fatal mistake in the fog. Maybe both parties would be content if Tanja's unlikeable boyfriend (Bjørn Moan) takes the fall instead, although it's not clear that the conscientious local detective Hagen (Gisken Armand) would allow that to happen. In the meantime, Engström isn't exactly helping to improve his reputation around town. In fact, after he takes sexual advantage of both Tanja's schoolchum (Marianne O. Ulrichsen) and the local hotel clerk (Maria Bonnevie), those rumors dogging Engström start to sound more and more believable. But then again, once he and the audience begin to see dead people hanging around like nothing's wrong, who really knows what to believe?
- I'm certainly not the first person to note the detached brutality that pervades much of modern Scandinavian film and literature, or at least the stuff that makes it across the ocean. Whereas stories like The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo are a little too repellent for my taste, works like Henning Mankell's Wallander series and this film really incorporate that tone to good effect. In Insomnia, something as innocuous as sunlight streaming through an inadequate window curtain starts off as a running joke before transforming into an increasingly tragic indicator of Engström's degenerating mental state. Add in Norway's naturally confounding haziness and Skjoldbjærg's wonderfully disorienting directorial stylings, and you'll soon find yourself wondering just how much of what we saw could be attributed to Engström's sleeplessness. He's guilty as hell, but you really start to feel sorry for the guy.
