Essentially a suspenseful character study, Insomnia is set in a small Norwegian town north of the Arctic Circle where the sun appears with only wan brevity for half the year and for the other scarcely sets. The most significant of the film’s many interesting aspects is director Erik Skjoldbjaerg’s evocation of the powerful effects of geography on human psychology. Insomnia affords international audiences a sense not only of a unique physical environment but of how one man’s psychological landscape ironically becomes a dark night of the soul in the land of the relentless, potentially maddening, midnight sun. Northern Norway, with its mountains, mists, and rugged shore, is gorgeous terrain; it also has one of the highest suicide rates in the world.
Stellan Skarsgard (of Good Will Hunting and Breaking the Waves) is a noted Swedish homicide detective called to the far north to investigate the death of a 17-year-old girl. Tight-lipped, almost dour, Skarsgard’s detective has become almost inured to murder over the years. He says with little evident emotion to one of the local deputies: “The cases begin to run together” and “It’s important to separate your work from your personal life.” Nonetheless, the viewer is just able to perceive, beneath the chill exterior of this low-affect, postmodern hero, that the innocent beauty of this victim and the apparent twistedness of her murderer awaken his hibernating sense of moral outrage. Skarsgard is perfectly cast; with his huge frame, sagging slightly with worldweariness, his lank blonde hair, and his tortured, soulful eyes, searching reluctantly for the bad news of the world, he’s a sort of Gary Cooper as Viking or a Lappland Liam Neeson.
Through a fateful accident, the detective becomes both pursuer and pursued. Implicated himself and unable or unwilling to admit the facts, he tries to proceed simultaneously as a moral avenger and a moral subversive. Writer Nikolaj Frobenius subtly and compellingly delineates the man’s vertiginous descent; Skarsgard brings to it unsettling humanity; and Skjoldbjaerg’s direction ominously bleeds together the unnerving, constant sunlight and the detective’s eroding integrity.
The place sense is palpable. As the detective’s compunction gets the best of him, he is able to sleep less and less. The pallid but persistent sunlight manages, like his conscience, to leach through his nightly efforts to block it out. The effects of his sleep deprivation begin to function simultaneously as an emblematic manifestation of his inner torture and a giddy detachment, a physical and mental state that gives him what shred of distance he can sustain from his ravaging guilt. There are even occasional traces of very black humor in the situation, of that peculiarly mordant variety characteristic of the old Norse sagas.
Insomnia is a cool piece of Norwegian irony – hyperboreal noir. –
© 1995-99 DesertNet, LLC . Memphis Flyer . Powered by Dispatch