Caught in the fog, Skarsgard accidentally shoots his partner thinking that he’s the killer. They spot the killer entering his creepy cabin on a foggy lakeside and a chase kicks off.
With surprising speed, Skarsgard is able to track down the whereabouts of the killer and brings a team of local cops with him.
Skjoldbjaerg opens with deeply creepy 8mm footage of a murder and a methodical killer so careful to remove any trace of evidence from the body that he even washes his victim’s hair. The film stars Stellan Skarsgard as a detective sent to solve a murder in a small Norwegian town in the midst of a 24-hour sunlit summer. Nolan may have done a good job at remaking the film for Hollywood without losing its dark soul, but he never came close to matching the hypnotic and haunting nature of Skjoldbjaerg’s original.
#Insomnia film light and dark 1997 serial#
The film starts off as a seemingly conventional serial killer police procedural before transforming into an exploration of the effects of intense guilt on the human psyche that somehow manages to become more tense and exciting when the conventional genre elements are stripped away. Insomnia is an inverse film noir, offering a hardboiled crime story riddled with guilt set in a landscape of 24-hour daylight with no shadows to offer relief or escape for a protagonist diving into darkness. It’s a film executed with such complete control of all of the thematic, narrative, and stylistic elements that it seems almost impossible to imagine he had never made a feature before.
While Skjoldbjaerg never quite managed to deliver an adequate follow up, his directorial debut was one of the most striking of his era. Insomnia (Erik Skjoldbjaerg, 1997) – Though sadly overshadowed by the Al Pacino and Christopher Nolan American remake, Erik Skjoldbjaerg’s Insomnia remains one of the greatest thrillers of the 90s.
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