Nightwatch
Ole Bornedal, Denmark, 1994, 107 mins
Review by Gerald Houghton (1996)
In his debut feature Bornedal is on bended knee to the grand-daddy of thrillerdom. In Hitchcock's celebrated edict, suspense derives not from simple shock-cuts but from parading before your audience the very essence of their terror - famously, the bomb under the table - and then letting the film unfold innocently about it; the characters worry about baseball, we worry about them.
The first quarter-hour is so laden with potential flashpoints that things teeter on the edge of black comedy. As the gnarled old nightwatch shows law student Martin (Nikolai Coster Waldau) around his new job at the city morgue he delights in pointing out a room bursting with sinister blood-red tanks, an unexplained photograph tacked to the office wall, the baseball bat he keeps for protection, and the alarm that will sound should one of the morgue cords be pulled. They are there, he explains, in case of mistakes. His parting gift is the dark hint of a previous incumbent's necrophilia. So it's when rather than if that alarm is going off, and Bornedal takes great delight in playing off his audience's anticipation. A psycho-killer is loose (they bring his messily scalped victims to the morgue), and Martin's defiantly immature pal Jens is a few (nasty) coupons short of a toaster. The two are playing a game of challenges that can only have grisly consequences.
Nightwatch is definitely a game of two halves, of which the second is much the inferior. To sustain 107 minutes requires the kind of careful handling that Bornedal demonstrates in spades, but engaging a wide audience requires a turn of plot that inevitably weakens proceedings. We have to know who the killer is, don't we? And we'll be disappointed if it's not someone we know, won't we? Face it, since Dressed To Kill the revelation will always be a let down. This hinges on a coincidence too far. And all the knowing speeches about how much like a movie a job at the city morgue is won't hide the cracks.
Still, Bornedal manages to weave something substantial around the disappointment. Martin's long nights of tiled corridors and stuttering lights are gems of genre filmmaking. He keeps his tale small, claustrophobic, shooting largely interiors (it was co-produced for Danish TV) and it's all the better for it. The retiring nightwatch tells our hero that his breath will begin to smell bad after a while; the film's own scent is a coppery ferment of blood and formaldehyde.
Bornedal should mind the flaws: he's currently in Hollywood overseeing a big budget remake with flavour of the Brit-month Ewan McGregor. Just let the appalling Hollywood remake/remodel of Sluizer's The Vanishing be warning enough: see Nightwatch done now - and almost certainly better.