Engström is, in virtually every way, a man out of place. Although he faces both language and cultural barriers as a Swede working in Norway, his primary impediment is his own callousness. A stoic, driven man of great skill and great moral fallibility, Engström arrives already dragging baggage, as rumors of his sexual indiscretion with a witness back in Sweden partially explains why he is now working in Norway. Skarsgård plays the character with a largely impassive expression that obscures what must be a cauldron of tensions, anxieties, and moral reckoning going on underneath, some of which begins to slip out as the days pass without darkness and Engström finds it impossible to sleep, despite taping blankets over his hotel window. Like a contagion, the light seeps through the seams and floods his eyes, threatening to illuminate everything he has to hide.

And Insomnia is primarily a film about secrets, which Skjoldbjærg and co-screenwriter Nikolaj Frobenius enhance by employing narrative and visual ambiguity throughout the film. Those looking for a neat, clean thriller in which all questions are answered and all problems resolved will find Insomnia to be a challenging experience because Skjoldbjærg is not particularly interested in the traditions of the murder-mystery genre. Instead, he is fascinated by the conundrums of human psychology and moral frailty, which is why the film is centered on a protagonist who is generally dislikable as a person, yet is inherently compelling as a human subject.

About a third of the way into the film, Engström sets up a sting to capture the killer, and during a fog-enshrouded chase he accidentally shoots and kills the wrong man. It is an accident, but for reasons both obvious (Norwegian law forbids police officers from carrying weapons) and obscure, he quickly decides to cover up the incident, blaming the suspected killer and manufacturing evidence to hide his guilt. The cold effectiveness with which Engström covers his own crime associates him with the killer he is pursuing, who we first see in grainy 8mm footage during the opening credits washing away all traces of his involvement from the girl’s corpse. Detective and killer becomes symbolically one in the same, the conventional moral spectrum collapses, and thus it is not terribly surprising that during the second half of the film they become literal partners, as each holds evidence that implicates the other in murder.

Working with veteran cinematographer Erling Thurmann-Andersen, Skjoldbjærg creates a unique look for Insomnia that fundamentally inverts the traditional contrast dynamic of film noir by replacing dark with light (its color palette stretches primarily from blinding white to various shades of blue). What is most fascinating about the use of light in the film is that it obscures just as much as it illuminates. The cold, clinical lights of an autopsy room reveal secrets about the girl’s death, but the constant blinding sunlight outside becomes almost overwhelming, drowning the world in a sea of white. Engström squints into the midnight sun, and he tries desperately to keep it out of his room while he lays sleepless in his bed. The light becomes synonymous with his guilt, and as he begins to act more and more like a tyrant, most frighteningly in a sexual tryst gone bad with the hotel’s pretty receptionist (Maria Bonnevie), we get the sense that his true self is being fully revealed. The lack of sleep starts to strip away that carefully controlled, stoic exterior, revealing something that may be fully monstrous underneath. Insomnia is a thriller in which monsters pursue monsters, and the lack of clear-cut resolution at the end is only appropriate given the ambiguous nature of all that has preceded it. The midnight sun shines, but never quite illuminates.

Copyright ©2014 James Kendrick

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