In a brief prologue, shot on Super 8, we witness the violent death of seventeen-year-old Tanja Lorentzen (Maria Mathiesen), followed by the killer covering up the traces of his crime. ” In Insomnia-to use a phrase with the ring of the pulpiest paperback title-only the dead sleep well. In a telling line, the murderer recounts how his victim died: “She slept and slept and slept. This is the setting for what is ostensibly a murder mystery-but the killer’s identity emerges relatively quickly, and the focus of the story then shifts to the psyche of the detective, tormented by the constant light. The setting is Skjoldbjærg’s hometown of Tromsø, in northern Norway, about two hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle, a place that from spring to late summer has no real night. For this film’s universe is constantly, intensely exposed to the glare of daylight-even when it is supposedly nighttime. Thus, having created a secret, it may involuntarily begin to occupy an increasing amount of one’s own attention.” Hence a drama in which things-objects and personal secrets alike-tend to remain tantalizingly concealed, and yet in which there are few hiding places. In the press notes for his debut feature, Skjoldbjærg commented, “ Insomnia was inspired by a notion on secrecy: when one chooses to conceal from others, one consequently risks losing one’s own perspective. The 1997 Norwegian detective thriller Insomnia is a paradoxical object-as director and cowriter Erik Skjoldbjærg has described it, “a reversed film noir with light, not darkness, as its dramatic force.” Insomnia is so drenched in light that you could call it a film blanc- blanc meaning “white” but also “blank,” given the film’s detached chill, as opaque as the features of its policeman antihero.
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