1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 88: Insomnia
And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.(John 3:19)
I should admit, I fell asleep a few times while watching Insomnia. Not that it’s ever boring; I was just tired. Stellan Skarsgård’s portrayal of an even wearier sinner is very entertaining. (The story was transplanted to Alaska five years later, in 2002, by Christopher Nolan, with Al Pacino in Skarsgård’s role; I prefer the Nordic version.)
Skarsgård is Engström, an accomplished Swedish homicide cop banished to Norway because of “improprieties” done with/to witnesses. He travels north of the Arctic Circle to investigate a young woman’s killing. He’s chronically sleepless, and the sun-pierced evenings don’t help; even so, he figures out how to lure the killer into a trap. But during the “sting” the killer wounds a policeman and escapes into a dense fog. Engström pursues and shoots, killing a colleague by mistake.
He tells the other police that the killer fired the shot. Now the killer knows that he’s a killer.
He’s forced to truce with the killer, deceive his colleagues, and pin the blame on someone else.
Forced? Why not just tell his colleagues what really happened? It was an accident, after all. But Engström can no longer think of himself as not guilty. He knows his own depravity. In the Arctic, he continues – compulsively – to engage in the kind of “impropriety” that landed him in exile. And he habitually lies to cover his tracks.
All of this takes its toll. There’s a remarkable scene in which Engström waits near a busy sidewalk. Folk stare accusatorily as they pass by. Engström withers under their view. They’re all judging him. The judgment probably is all in his head. You’d think he was the criminal, not the cop. When he meets the real criminal, he can’t help looking away, can’t help shrinking, as if he were the guilty party.
It’s like a Poe story. The doubling. The paranoia. The sinning rushed into, to relieve the misery of previous sinning.
Decent people surround Engström. Vik, his southern colleague – the man he accidentally kills – offers wry, bleak comfort, even a sort of affection, while alive; in death, he appears in Engström’s daydreams, alarming but not unfriendly. Less disturbing, almost angelic, is the friendliness of a pretty hotel clerk; Engström makes a hash of that relationship, too. The local police behave with sympathy and professionalism. One of them, tasked with looking into Vik’s shooting, treats Engström curteously even as she notes inconsistencies in his statement. Engström can’t look her in the eye.
This isn’t a subtle movie. That’s all right. Sometimes, a glaring metaphor – in this case, harsh, inescapable daylight – is what’s required.
One more metaphor: a highway tunnel, the only truly dark place in the movie. This image is more enigmatic. What does it mean when Engström sees the light at the end of this tunnel? Significance aside, is he fit to drive?
