Danish with English subtitles
107 min., 1994 (?)
Unrated (as of 10/94)
The first indication you get that this movie might suck comes in the very first scene, when, just as a television report makes mention of a brutal stabbing, someone knocks over a bottle of red wine. This sort of club-footed imagery could be quaint if it weren't for the director's irritating use of cheap, incidental shock tactics (Boo! Just kidding) to get a rise out of viewers. For a movie that flirts with prostitution, mutilation and necrophilia, Nightwatch is dispiritingly timid. By the time truly weird things start to happen, the movie has already worn out its welcome.
The story, promisingly enough, concerns a law student (Martin) who takes a job as a night watchman in a morgue. Every night, he must steel himself to patrol the corpse storage room, up an aisle in between a half-dozen bodies on gurneys, with blue toes sticking stiffly out from under white sheets. The audience shares Martin's apprehension, and weird stories about corpse abuse and reports of a serial killer on the loose (one of the bodies is wheeled into the morgue on Martin's shift) add to an aura of perversity and dread.
Unfortunately, we also have to put up with a standard-issue buddy story. Martin's pal Jens is a free, vulgar spirit and a practical joker. The two have girlfriends (who are fairly incidental to the plot until one of them becomes a damsel in distress), but naturally each of the men understands things about the other that their lovers never can. The character development that this secondary plot involves pays off toward the end of the film, when Martin begins to wonder just who the killer might be, but by then your eyelids may be dropping. The film-festival crowd I saw it with (Chicago) seemed to love the movie, but the twists and turns that so entranced them are the same sort of meaningless whodunit tease that gave Basic Instinct a reason to live. Eeny-meeney-miney-mo, pick a killer by the toe ... but I digress.
Director Ole Bornedal has infused a few of the early scenes with an admirable tension, but undercuts that atmosphere as he struggles to set up the story's complex denouement by repeatedly dwelling on the relationship between Martin and Jens. And one truly disconcerting sequence involving a missing body is thrown away and never explained or alluded to again. The first unremarkable hour is almost redeemed by the climax, which is undeniably exciting and in which one of the leads is forced to figure a most unsavory way out of a brutal dilemma. Still, the final scenes borrow heavily and without inspiration from the recent history of Hollywood action films. Certainly it's a kick for buffs of the macabre to see a reasonably intelligent, well-acted film (with subtitles!) set among so many corpses, but as far as the possibilities of the horror film, Nightwatch is treading strictly shallow waters.
