He couldn’t sleep because of the sunlight hitting at his hotel room window. The poker-faced detective is haunted by the light. A task made all the more agitating due to the sun’s relentless glare. His job is to reveal the truth, but fascinatingly upon touching ground, the man ends up attempting to mask his inefficiencies and mistakes. From his flight window, Engstrom stares across the ‘land of the midnight sun’, while on his lap rests the photographs of the dead girl. Swedish detective Jonas Engstrom (Stellan Skarsgard) and his partner Erik Vik (Sverre Anker Ousdal) are brought in to the small Norwegian town of Tromso to assist in the murder inquiry of 17-year-old Tanja Lorentzen (Maria Mathiesen).
Nevertheless, the film-maker offers something more impressive: a brilliant study of guilt and repression further strengthened by the literal and metaphorical importance of the implacable midnight sun. Director Erik Skjoldbjaerg doesn’t provide us either of these things. The snuff-film aesthetics of this sequence adds to the chilling tone, and instantly prepares us to expect a serial-killer thriller or at least a whodunit mystery. The film opens in a Fincher-esque fashion ( ‘Se7en’) detailing the murder of a young girl and the (unseen) killer methodically attempts to clear the evidence by scrubbing off her fingers, washing her hair, stripping her clothes, and eventually packing her in a big black trash bag. Fog and encroaching sunlight during the high summer of Northern Norway are the primary destructive forces that sets off a detective’s downward spiral in Erik Skjoldbjaerg’s gritty neo-noir, Insomnia (1997).
0 kommentar(er)
