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Nightwatch
Nightwatch is a classic Euro-thriller: dripping in atmosphere, a thick layer of social commentary, and far more concerned with evoking a gut reaction through style than making sure the plot hangs together or stands up to scrutiny.
Nightwatch stars a very young Nikolaj Coster-Waldau as Martin, a carefree law student who takes on a job as nightwatchman at the morgue in Saint Hans Hospital in Copenhagen as an easy way to earn money.
The naturally surreal and frightening atmosphere is compounded for Martin as a string of necrophiliac serial murders bring Inspector Wormer (Ulf Pilgaard) around.
As the bodies pile up Martin’s sanity is threatened and the tension increases as the victims’ identities seem to connect them to the morgue and implicate him as the killer.
Unfortunately just as Martin makes a discovery that could clear his name, his life comes under direct threat from the killer leading to a final showdown.
If that premise sounds familiar it ought to: the film was remade in 1997 by the same director with a script by Steven Soderbergh and starred Ewan McGregor, but the Danish original is the far superior work. It’s more tightly controlled and atmospheric and the low key performances from the supporting cast do a lot to let the tension seep in slowly to the viewer’s mind.
Nightwatch is a mood piece. It draws much of its power from the idea of being isolated: isolated physically from working in a morgue, isolated from most of the world in a small group of students chasing an advanced degree, and isolated from the emotional weight of the consequences of your actions because you’re young and don’t know any better.
The morgue is like a clinical haunted house and after a wonderful introduction from the retiring watchman that Martin is replacing the audience is primed for the suspense sequences which generally rely far more on suggestion than actual violence.
The physical violence of the killer is juxtaposed with the emotional violence of Martin’s best friend and classmate Jens (Kim Bodnia) whose childish pranks soon reveal a sadistic dark side, especially in his dealings with Joyce, a young streetwalker he pays to humiliate herself in public along with Martin. These scenes provide a socially conscious thematic level to the film: both a reminder that the victims of the killer are real people who are suffering, and that Martin and his friends see themselves as distanced from suffering and death and that working in the morgue has brought Martin into a primal confrontation with it.
All my problems with Nightwatch are at the plot level: the killer practically announces his identity in his first meeting with Martin for anyone who has ever seen a thriller and it robs the entire third act of a lot of its suspense.
That said, even though the surprise is tipped early, the final set piece is masterful: a tremendously staged and edited bit of work cutting between Martin and Kalinka crawling on broken glass and the killer trying to convince a group of policemen he’s on the level– it’s a sequence that Hitchcock would have been proud of.
The question of whether you should go back and revisit Nightwatch really depends on what you value in a thriller: if you’re looking for a tightly constructed story or an in depth character study you’re not going to find it in this film. The characters are all mostly caricatures and the script is a clothesline upon which suspense sequences can be hung. However, if you’re interested in the interplay between comedy and horror, or interested in a different kind of horror film that effectively uses suggestion and misdirection, there’s a lot to like about Nightwatch. It’s genuinely unsettling and extremely well shot and edited.
Nightwatch: Demons are Forever
Well, it’s thirty years later Borendal has returned with a legacy sequel Nightwatch: Demons are Forever which is available exclusively on the horror focused streaming service Shudder.
The film stars Fanny Leander Bornedal as Emma Bork, the daughter of the original film’s protagonist Martin (Coster-Waldau reprises), who takes the same nightwatch job her father did thirty years ago at the Saint Hans Psychiatric Hospital just as a new string of serial murders seems to lead to one of the patients there, Bent (Casper Kjaer Jensen).
Emma sees the new killings as a chance to bridge the trauma that has left her father a wreck and moved her mother to take her own life and begins an investigation with the help of her boyfriend Frederik (Alex Hogh Andersen). The investigation, as you might expect, leads her straight to the surviving villain of the first film and places Emma and her friends in extreme jeopardy.
Nightwatch: Demons are Forever is a difficult piece for an English speaking reviewer to assess objectively because it is clearly intended to evoke nostalgia for the imagery and style of the 1994 Danish original to a Danish audience that would consider it a cinematic touchstone, and I don’t have that nostalgia. It would be as if the first Halloween film you had ever seen was the 2018 entry– it may or may not work as a stand alone thriller, but you just know you’re missing a lot of cinematic context and it feels wrong to review it without just stating that up front.
I am familiar, however, with the 1997 American remake from the same director and while that film was generally not as well received as the original it has remained in my cinematic memory primarily for the excellent cinematography which almost evokes the depth of shadow and oppressive atmosphere of film noir. It found real dread in simple elevator shots, and was a supremely stylish thriller in a decade full of very stylish thrillers.
So I must admit that my reflexive reaction to the film is disappointment in how the digital photography makes this look like literally any movie that’s made for contemporary streaming services. It has moments that should be really frightening or evocative, Emma meeting Dr. Wormer springs to mind here, that just don’t land the way they should because the cinematography is so flat.
That’s a comparatively small problem though: the American remake was criticized at the time for having somewhat stilted performances from its young cast of fine actors (McGregor, as mentioned but also Roseanna Arquette and Josh Brolin appear) but this was a deliberate stylistic choice by director Borendal who was working in a long European tradition of contrasting the violence of his thriller with vapidity of the middle class protagonists as a kind of subversive statement. It’s somewhat akin to the way the family is written in Haneke’s Funny Games or in Danny Boyle’s excellent Shallow Grave.
Now that’s a completely justifiable thematic decision but the issue is when you’re returning to the material thirty years later in order to talk about the legacy of trauma, and you’re already winking at the audience by having the daughter of your original main character go beat for beat through the same plot in the first two acts of the film, you need to put more meat on the bone in terms of character in order to hook us.
Bornedal essentially decides to repeat himself by presenting his cast of normal young people as sex obsessed goofs with no people skills who think they’re a lot funnier and more clever than they are. If this were a standalone thriller, fine, but since I know you’re rehashing the plot of an earlier film wouldn’t it behoove the film to try and search for something new to say about young people?
Worse still, at least the original feels authentic in its portrayal of vapid young men cruising Los Angeles, but thirty years on Bornedal ‘s critiques of the kids today have the edge of an old man concerned for who’s on his lawn.
The film is not awful: the plot actually holds together pretty well and watching Nikolaj Coster-Waldau play as an older, traumatized father after years following him in Game of Thrones was nice, and I’m sure it would have had even more resonance if I had seen the original picture but Nightwatch: Demons are Forever feels more like rote repetition than stylish reinvention.
Nightwatch extras include audio commentary, making of doc, new interview, appreciation by film critic/Nordic Noir specialist Barry Forshaw, and trailer.
Nightwatch: Recommended
Nightwatch: Demons are Forever extras include 2 video essays by film critics Heather Wixson, & Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, and trailer.
Nightwatch: Demons are Forever : Not Recommended
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