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| Nattevagten (Nightwatch) |
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  (6/10)
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Runtime: 107 |
| Public Rating: 10.00 (3 votes) |
Director: Ole Bornedal |
MPAA Rating:  |
| Genre: Suspense |
Year: 1994 |
| Writer(s): Ole Bornedal |
| Reviewed by: Goatdog |
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For the first hour, Nattevagten (English title: Nightwatch) had me convinced that I was seeing a great suspense thriller. A lot of the shocks were new, the acting was above average, and director Bornedal had me by the short hairs, both dreading and anticipating each new twist. Somewhere along the line, it turned into an average American suspense thriller. Too many idiot plot developments, too many coincidences, and too many gaps in logic made it fall apart, and by the end, when the leads are all getting married and talking about what would happen if their experiences had been an American thriller, they should realize that they were already in one. This movie has a really good reputation, and as a result director Bornedal came to Hollywood to direct an ill-fated English language remake starring Nick Nolte and Ewan MacGregor. What I heard about the original made me think it would be up there with "Seven" or the like. I guess they just meant that it was noticably better than the remake.
Martin (Nicolaj Coster-Waldeau) is a handsome young law student who gets a job as a night watchman at the local morgue. What a choice. I wouldn't have made it ten minutes. His job is basically to walk to certain checkpoints and turn a key in his time log contraption. This gives the director the opportunity to use great depth of focus to show the key dangling what seems like miles away from him, across gurneys occupied with corpses or along shadowy hallways. The best thing about the movie is the atmosphere of tangible dread that builds in every scene taking place at the morgue. It had me clutching a pillow to my face, ready to cover my eyes but easily peeked around.
Martin's best friend is Jens (Kim Bodina), a sadistic daredevil who is also, unbelievably, a law student. The two make a childish dare: if one friend challenges the other to do something, he must do it or marry his girlfriend. This leads to frat boy stupid acts like facing down two huge bullies, picking up hookers, etc. Martin's girlfriend Kalinka (Sofie Grabol) is madly in love with him, but doesn't really approve of Jens. For good reason, it turns out.
There happens to be a serial killer wandering around town, killing prostitutes. Turns out he has killed the roommate of Joyce (Rikke Louise Anderssen), the hooker Jens picks up to challenge Martin with. The evidence piles up, all of it pointing to Jens. However, one of the idiot plot developments is that the two men have switched names; Martin said he was Jens, Jens said he was Martin. This fact, which only exists so there could be a scene later that fingers the real killer, was one of the problems that added up to ruin the movie, at least the last half hour.
I don't know why so many suspense thrillers fall apart at the end. It may be because it is truly difficult to write one that satisfies viewers' sense of logic as well as being original enough to surprise. You could tell a mile away who the killer was, because in these movies it's always someone intimately associated with the case. The movie presents you with a cast of seven people, one of which is the hero, two are the girlfriends, and one other character ends up dead. Out of the three left, all the evidence points at one of them, which means in movies like this that he couldn't be the killer. That leaves two. When you see the movie, it won't be hard to narrow that down by about the 60 minute mark.
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