#47: Insomnia
Good morning, friends!
Since you heard from me last, I have seen two of my best friends for the first time IRL since February 2020 and I’ve been riding that high ever since. Highly recommend!!
#47: Insomnia
Director: Erik Skjoldbjærg
Country: Norway
Year: 1997
Runtime: 97 minutes
Language: Norwegian, Swedish
** As always, this post contains spoilers**
CW: Violence, murder, animal death
Y’all, I don’t know that I’ve wanted to love a movie more than I wanted to love this movie. A 90s Norwegian thriller about a murder in the Arctic Circle, starring a Skarsgård? The description: 10/10, gorgeous. NO SPOILS YET, but I have to be real up top: it’s sort of a stinker. I know!
As the opening credits roll, we see a teenager, Tanja (Maria Mathiesen), essentially being murdered in a barn. It’s filmed very choppily, so it’s hard to tell what’s happening but she’s definitely dead from a head injury. After she’s dead, a person in black leather gloves washes her hair, cleans her nails, and puts her body in a black plastic bag.
Cut to two men on a plane over the Norwegian Arctic: Jonas Engström (Stellan Skarsgård) and Erik Vik (Sverre Anker Ousdal). Vik is asleep on Engström’s shoulder as he looks through police photos of Tanja’s body after it was discovered.
Engström and Vik are police officers from further South who have been called in to investigate the murder in Tromsø. Engström is Swedish (this is important!). As he looks through the photos of her body, he marks Tanja’s face out with a pen (???).
They arrive at Tanja’s autopsy where Engström...sniffs her hair (again, ???).
This is conveyed as a sort of smart cop move because now they know the killer washed her hair, but STILL. Also, not to call her out, but the actor playing this dead girl moved her eye a little bit and I just want to say I very much respect actors who can play dead convincingly and I actually do not know how they do it.
It turns out Tanja went to a party and then turned up in a garbage dump 30 hours later. They can’t find any other physical evidence because of how well her body was cleaned.
As he exits the autopsy room, Engström hears the local police officers gossiping about why he was fired from his post as an investigator with the Swedish police. Apparently our dude had sex with one of the main witnesses in one of his cases. Whoops!
Engström and a local female investigator, Hilde Hagen (Gisken Armand) search through Tanja’s apartment. There is a Keanu Reeves poster and a poster of another young hot man that I could not identify, who Josh then revealed to be fucking BONO. Excuse me? Look at this:
They also find a Dolce & Gabbana dress ($$$) and fancy lingerie ($$$), leading them to deduce there was clearly a rich older man involved somehow. But who?
Hagen and Engström interview Tanja’s boyfriend (obvi), Eilert (Bjørn Moan), who is also a teen. They ask him about Tanja’s sugar daddy. He knows he exists but he doesn’t seem to know much more than that. Eilert is angsty but seems very innocent.
Vik and Engström arrive at their hotel. This is where we learn that Vik’s memory is starting to fail him. This is also where we meet the receptionist, Ane (Maria Bonnevie), who straight up tells Vik not to flirt with her.
The hotel is also where we meet who is supposed (I think) to be the most insidious character of all: the midnight sun. This far up at this time of year, the sun never sets, which can obviously make it very difficult to sleep. Engström is still up at 2:45 AM trying to close the blackout blinds, which are super inefficient and let in a ton of light.
The next day, Engström comes to talk to a classroom full of Tanja’s peers. I guess it was to hopefully get information, but he just tells them that they’ll never see her again because she is dead because she was murdered…
His speech is, thankfully, interrupted because the cops have found Tanja’s backpack. All of her shit is spread out on a table, which is one of my nightmares. Granola bar crumbs and Taco Bell receipts and a bunch of inexplicably sticky pennies for the world to see. Ugh. At that point, please stop searching for me.
Engström tells the media they have NOT located the backpack, places a decoy version of it near the shed where they found it (where they believe Tanja was prob murdered), stake out the shed, and hope to lure the killer if he freaks out that he forgot it and goes back. This is very smart!
Engström and like 10 other cops sit and wait near the shed with binoculars. A man in a raincoat comes and picks up the bag, but one of the cops accidentally knocks over his thermos and shatters it, alerting the man to their presence. They yell at him through a megaphone to stop, but he enters the shed. The cops walk into the shed and discover a trap door in the floor. They all drop into it, which puts them in a huge underground tunnel that empties out into some foggy mountains. In the fog, the suspect non-fatally shoots one of the Norwegian cops.
Engström pursues the shooter, carrying a secret gun from being a Swedish cop (Norwegian cops don’t carry them!). He engages in a brief but foggy shootout with someone. UNfortunately, he accidentally shoots and kills his partner, Vik, who, instructed to run left, ran right instead.
He sees the suspect’s gun on the ground and pockets it.
True to cop form, Engström lies and says it was the suspect who killed Vik, attempted to shoot him, and then fled. The Norwegian cop interviewing him tells him they should be armed there like they are in Sweden. Ooof.
On his way back to the hotel, Engström has to puke in an alleyway, presumably from guilt? A dog appears and barks at him (this is also important! I don’t just tell you stuff to tell you stuff). At the hotel, he asks the receptionist, Ane, for masking tape so he can tape the blackout blind shut to keep his room dark. He lies awake anyway, reliving the murder. He gets up to hide his secret Swedish gun in an air vent because it is now a murder weapon.
The next day, Engström visits the other Norwegian officer at the hospital who was shot in the leg but survived.
Engström asks him if he saw the suspect shoot Vik and he says no. He also asks *just curious* if they found the bullet that hit him. Fortunately for Engström, it went right through his leg so they don’t have it. Engström hallucinates seeing Vik walking down the hall.
All the cops return to the scene of the foggy shooting and a bullet is found this time, presumably from Engström’s gun. WHOOPS. He returns to the alleyway where he puked eariler, where the dog was, and shoots the dog with the suspect’s gun, which he also still has. He removes the bullet from the dog and replaces it in the evidence room with the one found at the scene that hit the unnamed Norwegian police officer. THIS way, the bullet that killed Vik and the bullet that shot the Norwegian officer will be consistent and it will look like the suspect shot them both and Engström will be safe from scrutiny. Again, this is very creative!
Josh says Engström is cracking, but I think he’s at peak creativity. Both are probably true.
Engström has a drink with the hotel receptionist, Ane.
He’s starting to look suuuuper sweaty and tired. He tells her that he had a brother who died when they were kids and that he used to invent stories about what happened to him and where he was. He realizes that he is kind of repeating history currently and quickly gets up. The receptionist tells him a man stopped by earlier looking for him.
Engström returns to the school the next day to talk to one of Tanja’s friends, Frøya (Marianne O. Ulrichsen). They take a drive out to the dump during which he feels her up under her skirt, then gets mad at her out of nowhere, parks the car at the dump, drags her out into the garbage, and tells her she knows where Tanja got all of her fancy clothes. He wants to know who the man was.
Frøya, obviously upset, says she never met the guy but that he was an “old pig.” She eventually reveals the man to be Jon Holt, a crime novelist whose book was found in Tanja’s backpack. He lets her go and she runs home.
Back at the hotel, Engström gets a call from Holt, the author, telling him to leave him alone. That night, he nails a blanket up on the window in another attempt to keep the light out.
The next day, they examine the Holt novel Tanja had in her bag. It is signed by the author, “To Tanja.”
Hagen, the female Norwegian cop who has more sense than any of them, confronts Engström about some inconsistencies in his story. His statement about the shooting isn’t possible. He basically tells her hellllooooo I was chasing a killer, I have no idea what happened. He says, “You can change my statement if you want,” and leaves.
Soon after, Engström chases a bus, thinking he sees Jon Holt in it, and gets hit by a car in the process. The driver offers to take him to the hospital, but instead he demands he follow Bus 27 and flashes his cop ID (is that what it’s called?). In the car, he’s still very sweaty but now he’s bleeding from a head wound. I just realized it's called a badge, but I’m *totally transparent* so I’m LEAVING IT.
The bus ends at an air tram (some might call it a cable car or a sky tram) that goes up a mountain. He gets on and confronts Jon (Bjørn Floberg) by saying, “Thanks for calling.” Jon initially denies knowing Tanja but eventually admits it, in a roundabout way, I assume because they’re on a tiny tram full of people. Once they're off, Engström roughs him up a bit. Jon reveals that he saw him shoot Vik. Blackmail baybeeeee.
Of course Engström can’t just let him go after that, so they go out in the snow somewhere and talk. Jon says that writing crime fiction became too boring and wanted to know what it was like to actually do it. He tries to relate to Engström, fellow murderer, but Engström is of course resistant.
Engström asks Jon about Tanja’s boyfriend, Eilert, and, knowing he’s stuck between a rock and a hard place re: being a murderer and a liar, he says, “We’ll have to make up a story about him.” Framing an innocent young man for a couple of murders baybeeeeee.
SO somehow having access to literally every house everywhere, Engström sneaks into Eilert’s room and hides the gun under his bed. Eilert comes home with another girl and Engström watches them have sex to black metal from behind a door.
Back at the police station, Engström’s colleague, Hagen, doesn’t think Eilert did it, though. She’s convinced it’s Jon and they interrogate him together. Engström does a great job of pretending to a) have never met him, b) have not just made a pact with him to frame a young man for a murder he committed, and c) be a hardass on him. Jon lies the whole time too, duh.
Back at the hotel, charming cottagecore receptionist Ane shows Engström a basket of very new kittens whose mother has died. They have a tender embrace and kiss VERY hesitantly. They end up making out against a 5 foot high stack of paper towels, but Engström takes it too far and she kicks him off of her, yelling at him not to touch her. She yells, “I only wanted to show you the kittens!” Sweet Ane.
Engström finally has invested in an eye mask, but still can’t sleep. He hallucinates Vik in his room talking to him. He cracks up laughing.
The next day, the cops find the gun under Eilert’s bed and bring him in for questioning again. He is obviously very upset. Just a plot reminder: whoever has the gun is the presumed killer of both Vik and Tanja since Engström did some ballistics tampering to essentially erase the presence of his gun.
Jon and Engström meet again. Jon tells him he can’t trust him because he’s not sleeping, which I guess is fair but also maybe don’t trust him because he is also a murderer like you? Jon says Tanja (her ghost) has been visiting him, warning him to be careful who he teams up with. Which is like….I cannot imagine something that Tanja’s spirit would be interested in less.
Jon tells Engström that Tanja’s death was an accident. She hit her head and went to sleep and he couldn’t wake her. He says, “She slept and slept and slept…” Engström slaps him, I think because he’s too jealous to hear about other people sleeping? He tells Jon he should leave and he walks away on a pier.
Jonas still can’t sleep and it’s sta-ressfulllll.
Hagen hears from Tanja’s friend that Eilert was never violent toward her, fueling her suspicions that Eilert is an unlikely suspect, despite the gun evidence.
Hagen and Engström visit Jon’s apartment one more time looking for evidence. Engström sees him fleeing off the roof, but of course doesn't say anything. Hagen tells him to get some sleep because he looks tired before she leaves. Why is telling someone they look tired such a sick burn every time?
Engström somehow knows to look for Jon at the pier. Jon is indeed there with a shotgun, but Engström tells him he just wants to talk, that he knows it was just an accident. Jon says he tried to have sex with her only one time in the shed, but she declined his advances. Engström kicks the shotgun out of his hand but falls and Jon kicks the shit out of him. As Jon flees, he falls through the rotted pier, hits his head, and drowns as Engström watches.
Engström immediately goes to Jon’s house and tears it apart, looking for something. He finds Tanja’s outfit from the night she died, confirming (though did we need it?) that Jon was the killer. At the house, he hallucinates both Tanja and Vik. He hands her clothes over to the other cops, but they decide Jon wasn’t the killer; he just had a relationship with Tanja. Plus, they found the gun at Eilert’s house so that’s sort of a big piece of evidence.
The head cop compliments Engström on his work on the case.
As Engström packs to leave, Hagen tells him she found a Norma cartridge case at the scene. Engström confirms that is the brand used by Swedish police.
“Say what you have to say,” he says to her. She simply leaves the cartridge on the table and leaves. Cops bein’ coppy!
Engström is shown in the car driving away from Tromsø looking sleepy.
The End.
So, this was not a BAD movie. I did not HATE it. But I also felt the title and possibly the whole premise was misleading because insomnia played, at most, a bit part in the plot. The only sense of Engström I had before the insomnia set in was that he was a cop who got fired for having sex with one of his witnesses...sooooo I’m made to believe it was the lack of sleep that turned him into the bad guy? I dunno! He sort of just seems like an asshole!
My possibly HOT TAKE is that it was the insomnia that actually made him more of a creative criminal mastermind and allowed him to (essentially, save for Hagen) get away with it. I believe he probably would have attempted to cover up the accidental shooting and conspired with another murderer without the insomnia but perhaps that’s what allowed him to do it well.
Anyway, I’d hoped for a more compelling insomnia storyline. No hate to king Stellan Skarsgård, but I am curious how our other king Al Pacino does in the US version.
Next up is Black Orpheus, a 1959 romantic tragedy. Our first Brazilian film! See you there, babes.
XOXO,
Steph