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Erik Skjoldbjaerg's Norwegian feature
"Insomnia" is many things simultaneously: at once a
quiet, austere mood piece and taut, invigorating thriller; an
entertaining whodunnit and probing psychological study; a mystery
in which the killer's identity is ultimately a petty distraction;
a dark and serious presentation of paranoia and self-destruction
strangely permeated with light, suffused with a light as
insidious and vampiric as the protag's increasingly helpless
attempts to cover up his own occasionally lethal failings. Said
protag ("Breaking the Waves"' Stellan Skarsgard in an
authentically uncomfortable and claustrophobic performance) is a
Swedish criminal investigator called to Norway when the naked and
beaten body of a teenaged girl is discovered there in a garbage
dump. In addition to his professional reputation, the
investigator has a suspiciously aloof disposition and a
legitimately spotty disciplinary record...his personal and
professional life overlap to the extent that this particular case
becomes catastrophically mishandled. By the time the narrative's
events concentrically spiral inward, he has committed numerous
felonies, killed a dog, and formed a mutually tenuous alliance
with the murderer he was called to catch, all in order to keep
his colleagues from uncovering his accidental killing of his
partner early in the investigation. Oh, yes, he also molests a
teenager and a motel concierge and becomes incapable of sleeping
(due to the perpetual Norwegian summer sunlight), much less
staying more than three steps behind his own harried decisions.
This is no "Bad Lieutenant" horrorshow, though, nor is
it really connected to standard criminal thriller conventions (by
the same token, this is hardly the "I Am
Curious"-styled existential piece Scandinavian film seems to
be commonly known for)...Skjoldbjaerg paces the film in what
could be called regular meter and gives it a spare, clinical
tone. The absence of the visual 'shadow' metaphor is compensated
for by the production's acrid blue/green/tan color scheme and
hyper-saturated lighting. Impossibly long stretches play out in
complete silence, and the isolated snippets of score have an
understated glacial quality that compliment the ambiguous
dealings they're emphasizing perfectly. The audience is kept
fixed on Skarsgard and his mental degeneration while never being
given any information extraneous to him...we discover case
developments with him, we hallucinate with him, transitions
between scenes/settings occur without his/our awareness, etc, to
exhausting effect. All this aside, the narrative itself is hardly
without its rather large flaws, loose ends, lazy deux ex
machinae, and unnecessary digressions, and the calculated tone
never reaches the disturbing extremes it points towards. Still,
though, it's an all too rare thing: a solid, finely polished
piece of entertaining craft that never begs for admiration,
preferring instead to quietly earn it.
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