Nikolaj Coster Waldau discovers frightening things while working the late shift in a mortuary in NIGHTWATCH.
Copenhagen hospital, Martin is dismayed to learn that his re­ sponsibilities include maintaining watch over a morgue filling up with the mutilated bodies of young prostitutes—victims of a serial killer who sexually violates their corpses and cuts away their scalps as trophies. Troubled by a lack of passion for his live-in girlfriend Kalinka (MIFUNE’s Sofie Grabol), Martin accepts a challenge from schoolmate Jens (Kim Bodnia, intense star of Nicolas Winding Refn’s tersely- titled thrillers PUSHER and BLEEDER) to “play with destiny” via a series of tests to torque up the intensity of their dull lives. When Jens goads Martin into an encounter with a 17-year-old hooker (Rikke Louise Anderson), his game of one-upsmanship attracts the attention of the killer, who sees in Martin the perfect patsy to take the blame for his string of mutilation murders. For better than two-thirds of
its length, NIGHTWATCH man­ ages to be both invigoratingly
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cerebral and disarmingly heart­ felt in its dissection of a gen­ eration so distanced from its emotions that declarations of love and devotion go unspoken to avoid sounding “like a bad American movie.” Comfortable more with one another than with the women who share their beds, Jens and Martin so despise the thought of a predictable life that their wager condemns the loser “to family life forever.” The as­ sociation of marriage as a fate worse than death is a devalua­ tion of life that puts these boy­ ish protagonists on common ground with Copenhagen’s “psycho killer,” setting in mo­ tion a drama fascinated by the separation of life and death, of attraction and disgust, of reality and fantasy. The prowling cin­ ematography of Dan Lausten (who also shot the Ole Bornedal- produced MIMIC for Guillermo del Toro) dwells with morbid ab­ sorption on the morgue’s collec­ tion of jars, bottles, casks and graduated cylinders filled with all
manner of specimens, remains and disconcertingly cloudy liq­ uids—a mise en scène that sup­ ports a narrative obsessed with the ineffective containment of vital fluids and dark desires. (Bornedal and Lausten also have fun with the concept of entrap­ ment, symbolized by a pin-up picture of convicted Lincoln con­ spirator Lewis Payne and by the moths that wind up doomed cap­ tives of a light globe above Martin’s workstation.) As it rolls toward its conclu­
sion, however, NIGHTWATCH begins to seem over-familiar and the film’s best asset—its sense of probability (rare even among quality thrillers)—dissipates rap­ idly as Bornedal piles contrivance upon contrivance, with Martin and Kalinka at one point hog-tied by the villain like the teen heroes of a Nancy Drew mystery. Rare will be the viewer who does not feel a gut punch of disappoint­ ment at the unmasking of the psykopat (at around the 80m mark, leaving nearly half an hour
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