Insomnia (1997): The Norwegian Original

The great joke of Insomnia (1997) is that it is a film noir with no night in it. Erik Skjoldbjærg’s debut sends a detective north of the Arctic Circle in summer, where the sun circles the sky without setting and the town never gets dark, and then builds a crime film in which every convention of the genre has been inverted by geography. There is no shadow to hide in. There is no cover of darkness. There is no comforting dawn to end the bad night, because the bad night is a fortnight long and it is bright the whole way through.

Jonas Engström is a Swedish detective seconded to a small Norwegian town to help with the murder of a teenage girl. He arrives with luggage, a partner, and a reputation problem back home that everyone has heard about and nobody mentions. Then he stops sleeping, and the film watches him disintegrate under a light he cannot turn off.

Light as an antagonist

Cinematographer Erling Thurmann-Andersen makes the midnight sun genuinely hostile, which is much harder than it sounds. The instinct with this setting is beauty — golden hour for eighteen hours, an endless glowing landscape. Skjoldbjærg refuses it. His Arctic summer is white, flat and sourceless, a light with no direction and no warmth, the visual equivalent of a fluorescent tube in a corridor at four in the morning. Faces get no modelling. Everything looks like evidence.

Then he gives Engström a hotel room with a window, and blinds that do not close properly, and the single most effective running gag in Nordic crime cinema: a man in his forties methodically taping cardboard, then foil, then anything to hand over the glass, and the light coming in round the edges anyway. The room gets darker and worse in the same movement. It is a superb physical metaphor that the film never explains and never needs to, because we have all been in a hotel room at 3am wanting the world to stop.

Skjoldbjærg’s other structural decision is to let the exhaustion get into the filmmaking. As Engström deteriorates, cuts start landing slightly early. Scenes jump. Ambient sound goes tinny and too loud. The camera holds on things a beat past comfort. None of it is showy enough to read as a technique — it just makes you, watching, feel faintly wrong, the way you feel on your third night without proper sleep. A less disciplined director would have given us swirling hallucination sequences. This one gives us bad edits, and they work better.

Skarsgård

Stellan Skarsgård was already an established Scandinavian actor and this is one of his best performances, because it is built almost entirely out of small physical failures. He plays Engström as a competent professional whose competence is developing gaps. He blinks too long. He loses the thread of a sentence and picks it up a half-beat late. He becomes damp — the sweat is a whole performance in itself — and his clothes stop looking like a detective’s clothes and start looking like something he slept in.

What Skarsgård understands, and what makes the film, is that Engström is not a good man being destroyed. He was already compromised when he got off the plane. The Swedish scandal that follows him is a matter of a man who could not keep his hands off a witness, and the film’s coldest suggestion is that his sleeplessness is not caused by what happens in Norway at all. He was like this already. The Arctic just took away the darkness he had been using to not look at it.

Around him, Skjoldbjærg builds a small, well-observed police world. Sverre Anker Ousdal’s Vik is the partner — decent, dogged, an ordinary colleague rather than a sidekick. Gisken Armand’s local officer Hilde is the film’s quietly best character: a provincial policewoman whose entire method is thoroughness, working through the case at her own unhurried pace, and generating more menace by doing her paperwork properly than any hotshot could manage with a hunch.

The nastiness underneath

The murder investigation is the film’s least interesting layer and Skjoldbjærg knows it, so he uses it to smuggle in something worse. The victim is a teenage girl. The men investigating her death spend a good deal of time handling her body, her clothes and her sexual history, and the camera keeps noticing how much the room enjoys it. There is a sequence involving the corpse being washed and examined that is filmed with an attentiveness that implicates everybody present, including us.

This is deliberate. Bjørn Floberg’s Jon Holt, the local writer who becomes central to the case, is a man who makes fiction out of exactly this material, and the film draws a line between the novelist’s interest, the detective’s interest and the audience’s interest that it declines to be reassuring about. Nordic crime as a genre has spent thirty years building bestsellers out of dead young women. Insomnia got in early and made the appetite itself part of the plot.

The bloodline

Christopher Nolan remade this in 2002 with Al Pacino, Robin Williams and Hilary Swank, relocated to Alaska, and it is a good film. It is also a fundamentally different one, and the gap between them is the most instructive thing in either. Nolan was coming off Memento, which had made his reputation on a protagonist whose head could not be trusted, and Insomnia was the obvious next move — another unreliable investigator, another film about the stories men tell themselves. What Hollywood required him to change is a subject we will come to below the line.

For the collector, the film to put beside this is Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cure, released the same year on the other side of the world, and eerily its twin: a detective emptied out by proximity to a crime, a film that treats police work as a solvent for the self, and an ending that refuses to hand anybody absolution. Lars von Trier’s The Element of Crime is the Nordic ancestor — an investigator handed a method that asks him to think his way inside the man he is hunting — and where von Trier drowns Europe in sepia, Skjoldbjærg does the same job with too much light.

And Bong Joon-ho’s Memories of Murder is the essential companion for what a police procedural can be when it stops promising a solution. All four films are arguing that the detective story’s real function is to reassure, and that the interesting move is to withhold the reassurance.

The case against

It is thin. The film runs about ninety-five minutes and there are places where you can feel a first-time director declining to develop something because he is not sure he can. The supporting cast beyond Hilde and Vik are functions. The victim’s family barely register. And the picture’s central idea — the light, the sleeplessness, the man coming apart — is so strong that everything not directly serving it feels like padding between the good scenes.

Nolan’s remake is genuinely better on plot mechanics and on giving the antagonist a real intellect to play with. If you want a well-machined thriller, take the American one. What it lacks is the original’s willingness to leave you with nothing.

Where to find it

On disc from the specialist labels and intermittently on the streaming platforms; it is easier to find than it was, though it still drifts. Watch it before the Nolan, and watch it in daylight — the film loses something if you can retreat into a dark room, which is precisely the retreat its protagonist is denied.

Spoilers below

The hinge comes early, in fog. The police lay a trap for the suspect at a beach hut, and in thick mist and total confusion Engström fires at a running figure and kills his own partner. It is an accident. It is entirely, unambiguously an accident — and Engström, standing over Vik’s body with a service weapon and a Swedish disciplinary file already open on him, makes an instant calculation and decides to say it was the killer.

Everything after is the cover-up, and Skjoldbjærg’s structure is beautiful because the two crimes fuse. Engström must now catch the murderer in order to hang the shooting on him, which means the investigation is real and corrupt in the same motion. Every genuine piece of police work he does is also a piece of self-preservation, and he is good at his job, so the case advances.

Then Holt makes contact, and the film’s second hinge lands: he saw it. He watched Engström kill Vik in the fog. And what he proposes is a trade — his silence for the detective’s help in redirecting the murder investigation. Two men who have each killed someone, negotiating an alliance in a country where the sun will not go down. Floberg plays it with a novelist’s relish. He is not frightened. He is interested. He has found a plot.

And this is where the original and the remake part company completely. Nolan’s Al Pacino is a good cop who did a bad thing, tormented by it, and Nolan gives him a death that reads as expiation — a final act that squares the ledger and lets the audience out. Skjoldbjærg gives Engström none of it. His man solves the case, pins the shooting on a dead suspect, is quietly congratulated, and gets on a plane. Hilde, methodical and unshowy, works out enough of it to know — and the film’s last real gesture is her deciding, in silence, to let it go, because saying it out loud would cost her more than it would cost him.

Engström flies home. He has done a competent job. He has killed his partner and lied about it and helped a murderer and closed a case, and the machine has processed all of it into a good result. He may even sleep now, back in a country that has nights. That is the ending Hollywood could not use, and it is why the Norwegian film is the one worth the trip: it looks at a man who has got away with everything and refuses, in the brightest light available, to pretend that anyone is coming for him.