Haunted by guilt and unable to sleep with the midnight sun of the Arctic, Engström becomes increasingly unhinged and starts hallucinating about Vik. When one of his colleagues, Hilde Hagen ( Gisken Armand), is assigned to investigate Vik's death, Engström becomes worried about ballistic fingerprinting and tampers with evidence to support his story. While shooting at what he believes to be the suspect, Engstrom accidentally kills Vik, who had mistakenly run right instead of left as ordered.Įngström initially tells the truth about the shooting, but realises that everyone assumes that the fugitive shot Vik. Without telling his colleagues, however, Engström carries a gun from his days in the Swedish police, who routinely carry firearms. Events take a turn for the worse when the fugitive shoots one of the pursuing unarmed Norwegian police officers. Vik is nearing retirement age, and his memory is failing.Įngström 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. Engström 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. When 17-year-old Tanja is found murdered in the city of Tromsø, far up in the Norwegian Arctic, Kripos police officers Jonas Engström ( Stellan Skarsgård) and Erik Vik ( Sverre Anker Ousdal) are called in to investigate. The film inspired the 2002 American remake Insomnia. The screenplay was written by Nikolaj Frobenius and Skjoldbjærg, and the soundtrack by Geir Jenssen. Insomnia was the film debut of director Erik Skjoldbjærg.
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). The investigation goes horribly wrong when he mistakenly shoots his partner and subsequently attempts to cover it up. It’s remarkable how menacing never-ending broad daylight can be, considering that most crime thrillers favour the inherent threat of the dark and the shadows.Insomnia is a 1997 Norwegian thriller film about a police detective investigating a murder in a town located above the Arctic Circle. The look of the film, with its muted palette of cold blues and browns and the harsh light of the midnight sun, is a crucial ingredient and so is the Norwegian landscape, especially during the tense chase sequence set in the misty wilderness early in the film. I haven’t seen the 2002 remake by Christopher Nolan with Al Pacino (the only Nolan film I haven’t watched yet), but I’m willing to bet that it softened its version of Engstrom considerably. Even though his misdeed is an honest mistake, Engstrom is hardly a sympathetic character and it’s to Skarsgard’s credit that he remains a compelling protagonist to follow. The line between real and imaginary becomes blurred, making it hard to say whether certain sequences only exist in the detective’s fevered mind. I won’t spoil it but I’ll just say that the sunlight streaming through Engstrom’s hotel window at night is not just a quirk of the film’s setting, but a manifestation of his guilt.įrom that point on Insomnia unfolds more like a psychological study rather than a conventional procedural, as Engstrom becomes both the hunter and the hunted and his life transforms into a walking sleep-deprived nightmare.
#Insomnia film 1997 streaming movie
So far so yet another small-town dead girl mystery, but then the movie goes and throws a curve when Engstrom’s plan to trap the murderer goes terribly wrong. The movie begins with a disturbing montage of the murder, with the killer leaving no trace and even carefully washing the girl’s hair before dumping her body. Skarsgard plays Jonas Engstrom, a disgraced Swedish detective who is called in to investigate a murder of a young woman in Tromsø, a city above the Arctic Circle in northern Norway where the sun doesn’t set for months in summer.
I’ve been watching bleak and moody Danish noir lately, so I thought I’d change it up and watch some bleak and moody Norwegian noir instead, namely this 1997 thriller with Stellan Skarsgard.
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