Insomnia · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

The blind will not stay down. Jonas tapes it, wedges cardboard into the frame, lies back, and a blade of light finds the wall anyway. It is the middle of the night and the sun is up. He is a Swedish detective seconded above the Arctic Circle in high summer to work a girl's murder, and by the time he starts fighting that window he has already shot his own partner dead in fog on a shoreline and told everyone the killer did it.

Watch what the window does to the movie, because it is the movie.

In ordinary crime cinema a man perceives a problem and acts, and the act changes the situation. Deleuze called this arrangement the movement-image: perception loads, action discharges, the world rearranges itself around the discharge. Nearly the whole genre runs on that circuit. Skjoldbjærg gives Jonas one clean discharge, the shot in the fog, then breaks the mechanism for good. He tapes the blind; the light comes in. He hides the bullet; the case grows. He leans on the hotel receptionist; the lie needs another lie. Deleuze's term for this jam is the crisis of the action-image, the condition of a character who can no longer react adequately to what he perceives. It is usually located in bombed Italian cities, in people drifting through rubble with nothing to do. Skjoldbjærg finds it in a competent policeman in a clean hotel room, which is worse, because nothing here is ruined. The equipment all works. It just doesn't help.

Deleuze had a fine-grained account of the detective film, and it is worth borrowing because it makes the film's central trick visible. He called it the small form: not a large situation demanding a transforming act, but a small act that discloses a hidden situation. A gesture, an object, a lie caught in passing, and the world behind it opens by an inch. His sharpest sub-case is the index of equivocity, an act that could belong equally to two different situations, so you cannot tell which world you are standing in. Insomnia is built out of these. The shot in the fog is one event with two readings, and Jonas himself does not entirely know which one he committed. Afterwards every procedural move discloses two cases at once: he is running the investigation into his own crime, and each competent step is detection and concealment in the same motion. Hilde Hagen keeps turning up in the frame behind him, doing her job properly. She is what his gestures would mean if they meant only one thing.

The structural choice is the narrative invention. Put the misfire at the end of the first act, and the rest of the film stops being a whodunit and becomes a study of maintenance: the daily labour of holding a lie upright with a mind that is coming apart underneath it.

Now the light. Noir's morality was always carried by its lighting. Shadow was where information got withheld, chiaroscuro was the visible form of a compromised soul. Erling Thurmann-Andersen removes the shadow and keeps the morality. Exteriors go flat and overexposed and spatially unhelpful: scrub, rock, water, fish-drying racks, under a sun that flattens depth instead of modelling it. Deleuze's phrase for a space that has stopped working as a stage for action is the any-space-whatever, and this is its emptied variant, whites blown toward paper, a field offering a body no coordinates. Chinatown had already moved noir fatalism into glare, but Alonzo's Californian sun is merely indifferent, and it sets. This one doesn't, and it turns the hotel room into a failed darkroom. Light gets in around cardboard, under doors, through blinds, in blades and slabs. Skjoldbjærg's real invention is small and total: he made exposure, rather than shadow, the instrument of withholding. You cannot hide in this film. You also cannot see.

The film is also, in Deleuze's less flattering register, a naturalism. He used the impulse-image for cinema of appetite and compulsion running under the social surface, where conduct reads as symptom rather than choice and the whole thing tilts downhill. Jonas arrives already spoiled, trailing a disciplinary shadow from Sweden involving a witness, and he coerces the young receptionist before the misfire ever happens. He is not a decent man wrecked by an accident. And the style catches the same illness: framing and focus start behaving like symptoms. Shots run a beat past use. A fly, a flash of a face, a movement at the edge of frame arrive unannounced and are never resolved. Nothing is labelled hallucination. This is the Hamsun line reaching cinema, the unslept consciousness of Hunger under the same flat unmodelled northern light. Repulsion had proved a mind could be taken apart by dripping taps and light through shutters with no flashback and no diagnosis; Insomnia's leaking interiors and fan-and-fly sound design are the direct debt. Hour of the Wolf staged sleeplessness under a Baltic summer where Nykvist's naturalism turned hostile precisely because no shadow was available to hide the dread in. Geir Jenssen's score refuses to translate any of it. His drones are weather, not commentary. There are no stings, so nobody tells you how to feel about a revelation, and revelations stop feeling like revelations.

That refusal makes the film a genuine case of what Deleuze called the powers of the false, not merely a movie about a liar. Cinema's oldest contract is that the camera doesn't lie: whatever the characters get up to, the image is our witness. Touch of Evil bent the contract by making Quinlan supervise the inquiry into his own planted evidence. Vertigo bent it by rendering a policeman's guilt as an optical condition instead of a confession. Insomnia goes further, because it becomes less trustworthy at roughly the rate Jonas does and never tells you it has. Deleuze's name for a protagonist who produces truth rather than discovers it is the forger, and he noticed that forgers come in chains. Holt is Jonas's double. Their meetings are banal, a car, a room, two men who have reached an understanding neither will say out loud, and what passes between them is a jointly authored version of events. The film never restores an official one.

Then the ending, which is the hard part and the reason the thing outlives its premise. He is not punished. He is not forgiven. He goes on working. Nolan's skilled 2002 remake could not keep that and remain a Hollywood film, because Hollywood needs the verdict. Skjoldbjærg withholds it, the sun withholds night, and by the last reel those look like the same refusal.

What it did to the art: it showed that the most exhausted machinery in crime cinema could be revived by deleting the one element everyone assumed was load-bearing, and it did so from a small subsidised industry with no genre tradition and no export record. It carried 1990s arctic ambient into narrative scoring. It arrived at Cannes in the year Norwegian film stopped being invisible.

So watch the blind next time, not Skarsgård's face. Every time the light gets past it, a man tries to act and the world declines to change. The open question is the one the film hands you and won't answer: is that sun a punishment, or is it just weather?