Europe Endless - Scandinavia: Insomnia (Dir Erik Skjoldbjærg, 1h36m, 1997)

Norwegian cinema? Respects to the good people of Norway, its easy to regard the nation as a cinematic minnow alongside the otherwise heavyweight Nordics; it has only three Oscars, and a single Best International Feature Film (against Denmark's 4 and Sweden's 3), whilst filmmakers have accused the nation's industry of playing it safe, and its cinema system, once publicly owned, but increasingly privatised, of relying on international films, including from its Nordic neighbours and America. The history of Norwegian cinema is one spent in the shadows of other nations; whilst its cinema industry began just a year into its independence from Sweden in 1906, and figures such as Tancred Ibsen (grandson of playwright Henrik Ibsen) played an important role in its nascent years, its heyday remains the 1950s. 

Topped by their first win for Kon-Tiki (1957, for Best Documentary) in which explorer Thor Heyerdahl directs his own tale of navigating the Pacific on a raft, whilst horror movie Lake of the Dead (1958) and ski-resort comedy Fjols til fjells (1957) indicate the breadth of Norwegian cinema, it also brought  Nine Lives (Ni Liv, 1957), a taste of what comes to dominate Norwegian cinema: the Second World War movie. These range from the serious and nationally significant Max Manus: Man of War (2008) to the flippant in the gruesomely silly Dead Snow (Død snø, 2009)  in which hapless teens are picked off by undead Nazis. Whilst this is changing, with the arrival of directors like Joachim Trier, whose Sentimental Value (2025) would win the nation its first Foreign Picture Oscar, and whose body of work contains some fine dramas, Norway's cinematic millaise is equally felt in the fact that domestic directors like Joachim Rønning,  Espen Sandberg and Tommy Wirkola are leaving to make films in Hollywood, whilst films like Pathfinder and Cold Pursuit remake Norwegian movies for an international market (and often for the worst!) 

Thus enters Erik Skjoldbjærg, a journeyman of Norwegian cinema and television, and his midnight sun-lit neonoir, Insomnia. With two detectives, Engstrom (Stellan Skarsgård) and Vik (veteran Norwegian actor Sverre Anker Ousdal) brought in to investigate a murder in Tromsø in the height of the Norwegian summer, involving a young woman and a tangled web of lovers, so we get the beginning of a now familiar genre -the Nordic noir. Whilst the genre arguably stretches back to the aformentioned Lake of the Dead, and certainly to the 1950s, in the form of Mannequin in Red (Mannekäng i rött, 1958), in which a detective investigates a murder at a Swedish fashion house, it is in the late 1980s in both literary and cinematic form that it begins to take shape. 

Insomnia is, in appearance, a police procedural, a detective film, beginning with the murder of Tanja Lorentzen (Maria Mathiesen), whose life is meticulously picked over, and the arrival of Engstrom and Vik, together with the local police, to find the killer. Both are complex; Engstrom is an outsider, having been forced to leave his native Sweden due to indiscretions during a previous case, whilst Vik's failing memory will prove disastrous, as barely have the duo begun their hunt for the suspect than Vik is accidently shot dead by his partner during a stakeout for the suspect, and thus Engstrom is now alone in Tromso, and its twenty-four hour daylight, unable to escape. 

On the one hand there is the personal, his attempts to cover up his partner's death and his own use of an unauthorised handgun from his previous role from an official investigation headed by Hagen (Gisken Armand), which leads him to some extreme moments of corruption and violence in order to cover up his own tracks, and thus inevitably further implicating himself. On the other, the professional, the matter-of-fact, and often slow-moving, depiction of a detective case that has become synonomous with Scandinoir, in which Engstrom tries to find Tanja's killer from among her school friends, her boyfriend, Eilert (Bjørn Moan), and the wider community, and in which the bleakness beneath the quiet town becomes apparent. 

All the while, Engstrom's insomnia worsens, Erling Thurmann-Andersen's cinematography at points whiting out the world around Engstrom, the ceaseless daylight that hems in from every corner, leading the detective to tape his blinds shut, to create the photonegative of a noir, a world dominated not by darkness but by light. There is something tense about the hunt for the murderer, juxtaposed with the very mundane nature of Tromsø: there are no car chases to be had in Skjoldbjærg and novellist Nikolaj Frobenius' script, only Engstrom chasing after a bus he believes he sees his suspect on, later pursuing them to a ski lift and into a tense standoff. As the Scandinoir literary (and indeed, cinematic) subgenre would come to depict the juxtaposition of police procedural, the harsh, but beautifully shot landscapes, and the inner turmoil of the men and women whose investigations form the centre of the narratives. Vik even wears that hallmark of the genre, a knitted jumper. 

Insomnia is the genre in prototype, even in the case of its 2002 Christopher Nolan remake, starring Al Pacino and Robin Williams - it remains a work that is quintessentially Scandinavian; as a film on its own it is a distinctly Norwegian film, understated, distinctly cold, and using the landscape of the nation to create a story of entanglement, a town hiding a secret and cold-blooded murder beneath the midnight sun.

Rating: Highly Recommended

Insomnia is available on Blu-Ray from Criterion and on streaming from the BFI Player

Next week, we finish our first leg in Finland, and with one of their greatest filmmakers, Aki Kaurismäki in The Man Without a Past