Insomnia 1997 Movie
Princesex Voskamp
Insomnia is a 1997 Norwegian thriller film about a police detective investigating a murder in a town located above the Arctic Circle. The investigation goes horribly wrong when he mistakenly shoots his partner and subsequently attempts to cover it up. The title of the film refers to his inability to sleep, the result of his guilt, represented by the relentless glare of the midnight sun. Insomnia was the film debut of director Erik Skjoldbjrg. The screenplay was written by Nikolaj Frobenius and Skjoldbjrg, and the soundtrack by Geir Jenssen.
When 17-year-old Tanja is found murdered in the city of Troms, far up in the Norwegian Arctic, Kripos police officers Jonas Engstrm (Stellan Skarsgrd) and Erik Vik (Sverre Anker Ousdal) are called in to investigate. Engstrm is a police inspector formerly with the Swedish police who moved to Norway after being caught having sex with the main witness in one of his cases. Vik is nearing retirement age, and his memory is failing.
Engstrm devises a plan to lure the murderer back to the scene of the crime, but the stakeout is blown and the murder suspect flees into the fog. Events take a turn for the worse when the fugitive shoots one of the pursuing unarmed Norwegian police officers. Without telling his colleagues, however, Engstrm carries a gun from his days in the Swedish police, who routinely carry firearms. While shooting at what he believes to be the suspect, Engstrom accidentally kills Vik, who had mistakenly run right instead of left as ordered.
Engstrm initially tells the truth about the shooting, but realises that everyone assumes that the fugitive shot Vik. He decides to conceal his culpability. When one of his colleagues, Hilde Hagen (Gisken Armand), is assigned to investigate Vik's death, Engstrm becomes worried about ballistic fingerprinting and tampers with evidence to support his story. Haunted by guilt and unable to sleep with the midnight sun of the Arctic, Engstrm becomes increasingly unhinged and starts hallucinating about Vik. Things become even worse when he learns that Tanja's murderer saw him shoot Vik.
Engstrm learns from one of Tanja's friends that she had been seeing Jon Holt (Bjrn Floberg), a crime novelist. He correctly deduces that Holt killed Tanja, but Holt blackmails Engstrm with his knowledge of the Vik shooting. The two meet and decide to frame Tanja's boyfriend Eilert for her murder, with Engstrm later planting Holt's gun under Eilert's bed. However, Hagen is not convinced of Eilert's involvement, and when new evidence emerges, Engstrm knows that it is only a matter of time until Holt is arrested.
Engstrm tracks down Holt in some rotting wooden buildings at the waterfront and tries to talk with him. Holt suspects that Engstrm has come to kill him and holds him at gunpoint. He explains how he killed Tanja in a fit of rage when she rejected his advances. Holt tries to flee across a pier, but the rotten floorboards give way and he falls into the water below, striking his head on the way. He drowns as Engstrm watches. When he rummages through Holt's nearby house, Engstrm finds Tanja's dress, which Holt had removed before dumping the body. With Holt dead, and this definitive proof that he was the murderer, the case is closed.
Just before he leaves town, Engstrm is visited by Hagen, who shows him a cartridge case found at the site where Vik was shot. She notes that it is a Norma case, which Engstrm confirms is a brand used by the Swedish police. Engstrm expects Hagen to arrest him, but instead she simply places the cartridge case on a table and leaves. Engstrm drives out of town, his face and eyes showing great weariness, he seems not to have recovered from his insomnia.
The film has been widely praised as a psychological study and "semi-noir."[1] Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times compared it to the Fyodor Dostoyevsky novel Crime and Punishment.[2] For the New York Times, Janet Maslin praised the principal performance by Skarsgrd and added that "Mr. Skjoldbjrg's understated, elliptical direction keeps the material dangerous and volatile, with frequent small touches of the unexpected as Engstrom shows increasing signs of strain."[3]
On Rotten Tomatoes the film has a 95% rating based on reviews from 44 critics. The site's consensus states that: "taut and chilly, Insomnia is a solid showcase for Stellan Skarsgrd's estimable acting, and a brilliant debut for director Erik Skjoldbjrg."[4]
Detectives Jonas and Erik are called to the midnight sun country of northern Norway to investigate a recent homicide, but their plan to arrest the killer goes awry, and Jonas mistakenly shoots Erik. The suspect escapes, and a frightened Jonas pins Erik's death on the fugitive. Jonas continues to pursue the killer as he seeks to protect himself; however, his mounting guilt and the omnipresent sun plague him with an insomnia that affects his sanity.
A troubled police officer racked with guilt struggles to maintain grasp of his principles and sanity, as he gets pulled further down into a murder investigation under the unescapable light of the midnight sun.
"How can you take it? ... Two bodies in one week ... I've had it up to here ... It made me think of you seeing this year after year ... You get used to it ... You just have to avoid mixing your job and your personal life."
A great Nordic noir thriller! I saw Nolan's remake a while ago, and while I don't remember the details (maybe I'll revisit it now), I know I wasn't as taken by it as I much as I was by the original here. Would also LOVE some movie recommendations with Stellan Skarsgrd in the lead - between this and Chernobyl mini-series I'm realizing I must be missing out on some amazing performances by him, as outside of those two I've only seen him in small roles.
I watched Nolan's version on release in the early 2000s but never got round to the original until now. It's pretty great. It's essentially a character study in which Stellan Skarsgrd reveals his loneliness and anxiety as a detective who bumbles his latest case.
The Nolan version has a different finale, which focuses more on an integrity / redemption arc, while Erik Skjoldbjrg's debut is more focused on the psychology of both the detective and perpetrator with an ending that is more ambiguous. Skarsgrd gives a fine performance here and I'd recommend this film to anyone who likes a bit of neo-noir psychological thriller.
Insomnia begins with a scene that opens a thousand police procedurals: a man on a plane looks at a grainy photostat of a corpse. We all know how to read it, too: she's just been murdered, he's been called in to solve the crime. It's comfortable and familiar. Until the detective takes out a ballpoint pen and starts idly scratching out the victim's face.
The first act ofInsomnia is filled with moments like that; scenes that begin like a run-of-the-mill police procedural, but go slightly, uneasily off-kilter. I've seen it four times now, and it still makes me queasy. A lot of this has to do with Stellan Skarsgrd's excellent performance as Jonas Engstrm, a man whose guilt is making him lose his grip on reality. Scratching out the victim's face on the plane flight up is only the first scene that makes clear that Engstrm is not the sanest guy you'll ever meet. He smells the vicitim's hair during an autopsy, then caresses her face until he notices a female detective staring at him:
Engstrm, it turns out, is in Norway because he can no longer work in Sweden after being discovered "in intimate conversation" with a witness. And if you know the undying and irrational emnity Swedes and Norwegians have for each other, you know that he's fallen far. To make things worse, he's been assigned a case in the far north of the country, where the sun doesn't set during the summer. In the plus side, he's working with longtime partner Erik Vik, played by Sverre Anker Ousdal. Vik is Engstrm's link to human warmth, and they relate to each other like an old married couple: Engstrm pulls things out of Vik's jacket pocket without asking, Vik falls asleep on planes with his head on Engstrm's shoulder. So when Engstrm mistakenly kills Vik while trying to apprehend a suspect, he goes a little crazy. And by "a little crazy," I mean "batshit insane." Here he is at his worst:
He doesn't look too together there, obviously. He's hiding behind that door because two local teenagers came into the room while he was planting evidence to frame one of them for murder. And he hasn't slipped out of the room because he's watching them have sex. We already know he likes one of the two teenagers, Frya (played by Marianne O. Ulrichsen, who was also the production's assistant director):
And we know he likes her, because, despite her tender age, he's slid his hand up her skirt while questioning her. So: how do you make someone this unlikeable the hero of your movie? You make the villain even less likeable. The killer that Engstrm is after is a writer named Jon Holt, and he's seen Engstrm shoot his partner. So Holt and Engstrm become secret sharers, and the revolting pleasure Holt takes in finding someone else who has killed (and in being able to maniuplate him) puts the audience squarely in Engstrm's column. You can get a sense of Bjrn Floberg's performance as Holt from the scene where Engstrm first meets him (on a cable car, in a scene that owes a little to The Third Man):
Holt's infuriating smugness is critical to the way Insomnia works. There's no limit to Engstrm's cold detachment (this is a man who thinks baby kittens are "disgusting"), but he's downright charming next to Holt.
The second key to this movie is that Skarsgrd's performance and Skjoldbjrg's direction make it clear that Engstrm is paying a great psychological toll for the things he has done. It's not called Insomnia for nothing, and even before Erik's death, we know that Engstrm isn't sleeping well. But as the movie progresses, Skjoldbjrg portrays Engstrm's insomnia in increasingly subjective ways. The slow fades-to-white that Skjoldbjrg uses in the second half of the movie do a very good job of conveying the horror of being unable to sleep in a place where it's dazzlingly bright all the time.
c80f0f1006