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Movies

Insomnia

Review: 'Insomnia' leaves uneasy feeling

Web posted on: Monday, June 29, 1998 4:16:17 PM EDT

From Reviewer Paul Tatara

(CNN) -- There's more than a whiff of your basic American cop-and-serial-killer movie to Norwegian writer/director Erik Skjoldbjaerg's debut effort, "Insomnia." However, there's also a major departure from the norm in the screenplay's desperate psychological underpinnings, with star Stellan Skarsgard's coldly-distanced performance as the head detective only amplifying that desperation. Skarsgard's nominal hero is quite a bit less than heroic, and, at times, it's difficult to tell if we should even be concerned with whether or not he catches the killer.

For all it's genre-ready trappings, this one is about a cop who has lost touch with the real world. He tries to come to grips with reality again by obsessing over a monster, but the suggestion that he himself is nearly as monstrous as the killer is what keeps him awake. His conscience bothers him because he can't always manage to dredge it up.

Reviewer: 'Pretty freaked'

Skarsgard plays Detective Jonas Engtrom, an expert who, along with his partner, has been recruited from Sweden to try to catch the brutal killer of a comely young Norwegian high school girl. At first, I thought I was in for something on the order of the hugely crass "Seven," in which easy, grotesque displays of unspeakable violence are supposed to represent twisted-mentality insights on the screenwriter's part. The killing in "Insomnia," which takes place during the opening credits, is shot in raw black-and-white, probably on 8-millimeter film, with a droning synthesizer track underscoring the scene's morbidity.

It's pretty disturbing, to say the least, but Skjoldbjaerg pulls back a little bit and makes you watch. I got more caught up in the killer's vibe than I normally might because I had yet to find out if I could trust Skjoldbjaerg not to rub my nose in it. He manages to keep himself in check to some degree, but by the time the killer is shown stripping the now-dead girl and sensuously washing her hair, I was pretty freaked. It reminded me of the opening scene in David Cronenberg's "They Came From Within," and that's high praise when you're talking about someone force-feeding you the willies.

The initial killing is as bad as it gets, as far as on-screen violence goes, but Engtrom's descent into something approaching madness is loaded with strangely-motivated thoughts and actions that continually keep you a little bit off-center. He's having trouble sleeping when he hits the upper reaches of Norway because, among many other things, he's there in the summer, when the sun never sets. The lack of sleep wrings him out to the point that, one bright night when the shade won't stay down, he gets on a chair and actually staples his blanket over the window. The guy is ready to pop, but lack of rest is the least of his problems.

Abandoning convention

Early in the movie, we witness a stakeout at a fog-shrouded beach in which Engtrom panics, accidentally shooting and killing his own partner. No one else has seen it, so he covers it up, claiming that the killer approached them through the mist at the water's edge and committed the murder. The scene looks and feels like a nightmare, with Engstrom losing his bearings as he stumbles along the rocks, and the results of his disorientation are presented as yet another slap in the face.

You very quickly start realizing that the movie isn't going to contain a conventional good guy, something that Hollywood crime thrillers consistently can't do without. It's like you're watching a formerly-good man suffocating before your eyes, but you were never privy to his actions when he was more rational. You don't like him, but your only choice is to believe in him.

The killer (marvelously played, with an eerily pleasant smile, by John Holt) is found rather quickly, but that doesn't mean that the movie is over. He knows that the detective killed his partner, so the two men more or less agree to disagree and leave it at that. The problem is that Engtrom can't maintain his end of the bargain. He tries -- there are knowingly-false arrests, and even a weird groping of one of the teenage witnesses by the detective -- but we finally get a showdown between the killer and Engtrom that never gets anywhere near as obvious as what we Americans are used to.

If you live in a city where foreign films sometime stumble onto the screen at the cineplex, you should see "Insomnia." But, at the very least, write down the title and keep an eye out for the video release. It'll make you extremely uneasy, although, when it comes to movies centered around killing, I think that's better for the soul than finding a reason to stand up and cheer.


"Insomnia" is no joyride, but, aside from the opening killing, the violence is rather restrained. There's teenage sex and nudity, bad language, and a pervading sense of doom that doesn't necessarily go well with popcorn and a Coke. Rated R. 97 minutes.

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