Arrow Video Presents a Double-Feature of Nordic Noir: The NIGHTWATCH Collection (1994/2023) – Reviewed
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| All Images Courtesy: Arrow Video |
Ole Bornedal’s Nightwatch (1994) was one of the first films to successfully bring the chilly existential dread of Nordic Noir to US audiences, years before the genre fully crossed over to be a pop-cultural phenomenon here in books, television, and films. It introduced the world to Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, sparking his rise as an international movie star over the next few years, and also launched the career of Kim Bodnia, who would go on to the Pusher trilogy, The Bridge, and The Witcher. It caused enough of a splash at US art-house theaters that it got its own Hollywood remake in 1997, also directed by Bornedal, and starring Ewan McGreggor, Patricial Arquette, Josh Brolin, and Nick Nolte, although unsurprisingly the original is widely seen as far better. In the first wave of boutique DVD releases in the late-90s and early-2000s, Nightwatch received an Anchor Bay DVD special edition, but since then has gotten no other US physical-media distribution, leading to it becoming somewhat forgotten despite its significant place in 1990s world cinema. Now, Arrow Video is bringing Nightwatch back into the spotlight, with a limited edition box set featuring not only the 1994 original, but also Ole Bornedal’s 2023 sequel, Nightwatch: Demons Are Forever, which brings back most of the original film’s stars.
THE FILMS:
Nightwatch (1994):
In the original Nightwatch, a very youthful Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (in his first starring role) plays broke grad student Martin, who takes a job as the overnight security guard in his university’s hospital morgue. It’s a creepy place at the best of times, late at night when it’s dark and empty, but it becomes even creepier when he has to supervise several late-night deliveries by the coroner and police of young women who were victims of a serial killer preying on the city’s prostitutes. Soon creepy things start to happen around the morgue when he’s alone there late at night, and he begins to fear that the killer has noticed him somehow, and chosen him as a scapegoat to pin the murders on. When his bosses start to suspect he’s losing his mind, and the police start to suspect that he really is the killer, he and his girlfriend Kalenka (Sofie Gråbøl) have to solve the mystery of the murders on their own to clear his name and escape danger.
It's a great premise, if not necessarily an original one, and it’s built around a fantastic choice of location. The dark, spooky morgue is a character unto itself, and instantly lends the movie a great, unsettling vibe, which is perfect for the delightfully creepy hook of how the killer toys with our grad-student protagonist and makes him look insane. Nightwatch starts off extremely promising, with a phenomenal first act that builds up its oppressive atmosphere and casts a very unnerving spell. Every scene where he is alone on the night shift in the morgue is extremely creepy, and loaded with unease. The silence of the environment and the eerie liminal visuals create a tension that you could cut with a knife, and when a loud noise interrupts that silence, we jump out of our skin just like he does. The movie is beautifully shot, with dark, moody images tinted almost sepiatone by the lamps of the morgue, and the production has style to burn. It is very obvious why this film caught the attention of the international thriller crowd. However, after this first-rate opening act, the film starts to falter, in a big way, although it at least manages to pull things back together for an equally strong climax.
I can only assume that the first and last acts of the film are entirely responsible for the great reputation that it gained upon its release, because unfortunately the middle of the movie is a massively mixed bag, which at times strains both plausibility and audience patience. The plot meanders and loses much of its momentum, and way too much time is spent with our characters during the day, outside of the tense environment of the morgue at night. Considering how crucial the morgue environment is to the film’s atmosphere and sense of tension, leaving it for as long as the film does is a serious mistake, which breaks the spell the first act casts. After how disciplined and confident the first act feels, the second act feels unsure and directionless.
And most problematically, the middle of the film is dragged down by a pretty ugly subplot wherein Martin and his best friend Jens (Kim Bodnia), a narcissistic hedonist manipulator who is a deeply unlikable character, have a running bet where if one friend dares the other to do something, they have to do it. Martin’s bets are cheeky and mischievous, but Jens’s bets are sadistic and cruel, and largely revolve around strong-arming Martin into visiting prostitutes behind his girlfriend’s back, or in one very grotesque scene, forcing him to join Jens in publicly humiliating a prostitute in a fancy restaurant. Jens is such an over-the-top bad person and terrible friend, and his challenges to Martin are so grotesque, that it absolutely strains credulity that Martin would even tolerate this guy, and it makes us like and care about Martin less as a protagonist that he goes along with all this reprehensible behavior just to avoid losing a bet. Granted, at least part of the purpose of all this is clearly to make us suspect that Jens might be the killer, but the movie not only goes beyond what we need to think that, it goes beyond all reasonable levels of what kind of bad behavior Martin can tolerate or semi-willingly participate in and still be a protagonist we root for. Fortunately Nikolaj Coster-Waldau is such a compelling actor that he keeps us hanging in there, until the film finally eventually finds its footing again.
After losing its way in the middle chunk, Nightwatch manages to pull things back together in the third act, as it moves back to the claustrophobic constraints of the morgue after-hours, shifts focus back to the cat-and-mouse game with the killer, and ditches the weird, uncomfortable subplot of the bet between Martin and Jens. Some of the threads that felt loose and meandering in the middle of the film tie together in ways that work well, and Bornedal manages to not only land a satisfying conclusion, but a really good one. The climax of the film is tense, suspenseful, genuinely creepy, and effectively nasty (this time in a good way). Viewers who, like me, felt the film losing them in the middle should definitely be won back over by the excellent climax, and Nightwatch redeems itself as much as possible in the end.
Still, being as oddly uneven as it is, Nightwatch is a peculiar film to enjoy or recommend. A phenomenal first act, a baffling and bordering-on-bad middle section, and a very good climax is one strange combination of highs and lows. I would love to say that it’s worth a recommendation for the highs, because when the film is good, it is very good indeed. But it’s such an uneven experience that I can’t fully recommend it, and would just say that mileage absolutely will vary with this one. I loved its strong points though: its outstanding and moody liminal cinematography, its wonderfully creepy first act, and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau’s fantastic debut performance. He’s great in this film, and brings almost a modern art-house-Robert-Pattinson energy to the role, which I absolutely mean as a compliment. I really did not like the middle of the film at all, but for its strong points I’m very glad I watched it, and I can see why those strong points made the film a minor classic. It was certainly good enough to make me curious about the sequel. Which brings us to…
Nightwatch: Demons Are Forever (2023):
I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from a 30-years-later legacy sequel to a film that, while absolutely a classic that was important in its day, is such a mixed bag of impressive highs and dismal lows. But Nightwatch: Demons Are Forever surpassed any expectations that I may have had. This is that rare type of much-belated follow-up that actually manages to be a better film than the original, and a great thriller in its own right. A legacy sequel that fondly treats the original as a well-loved classic, calling back to it with visual and narrative parallels and echoed needle-drops and bits of dialogue, but in a way that feels sincere and not like cheap nostalgia bait. And while I found that the original does not entirely hold up to its classic reputation due to its unevenness, this sequel recreates all of the strengths of the original and makes good on them while ditching the first film’s weaknesses; taking everything that worked so well in the first and turning it into something that on the whole is better, or at least more consistently good.
This is Ole Bornedal looking back at his first major feature with warmth, fondness, and nostalgia for that younger time in his life, but also clear-eyed honesty about what didn’t work about it, and a desire to do it better this time around. He has clearly grown a lot as a storyteller in the intervening 30 years (with his sense for plot and character, I would argue, catching up to his already-excellent eye for visual style), and this return to his eerie medical-school morgue benefits a lot from that. The callbacks to the first film all work beautifully because they remind us of the things in the original that really do work, and in an odd way these callbacks, and this superior sequel in general, make the first film feel like a better film in retrospect, by strengthening the effect of its stronger points and helping it stick the landing, thirty years later. It makes so much sense that Arrow packaged the two films together, because they really do work as one whole, with the two films together being much stronger than either film separately.
Crucially to its success, Demons Are Forever is not just an exercise in nostalgia or an unnecessary sequel: Bornedal has built it around some very compelling themes that benefit from a sequel like this as their storytelling medium. The film is a surprisingly resonant and powerful exploration of inherited trauma, and cycles of pain and violence being passed down from parent to child. It is built around the idea that a horrific traumatic event like the serial murders in the first film leave two sets of victims: the survivors of the trauma itself, and then their children, who are inevitably raised in a home life haunted by demons who are not theirs.
The main character this time around is Martin and Kalenka's daughter, Emma (Fanny Leander Bornedal - Ole Bornedal’s daughter, who is excellent, and not just a nepo casting choice). She is now the same age that her parents were in the first film - a college student at the same university, ironically studying medicine in the same building where her parents were terrorized by a serial killer. But she does not know any of that history, because her parents have resolutely refused to talk about it. Instead Martin has become an emotionally repressed drug-addict single father, and all Emma knows is that something terrible happened to her parents, but she has no idea what. When she stumbles across a collection of newspaper clippings about the murders and the fateful night in the morgue, she decided to launch her own investigation, to find the truth behind the trauma that has shaped her life. She takes the same job her father had, as the nightwatch security guard in the morgue, so that she can poke around and do some research, and she decides to reach out to the imprisoned serial killer himself and meet with him. Unfortunately for her, making contact with the imprisoned killer brings her to the attention of a copycat killer, who plans to continue his legacy. But rather than just repeating the same scenario as the original, with Emma and her friends becoming the next generation of victims and survivors, the movie focuses in on the personalities of Emma and Martin, and explores how the trauma of that night has affected these two generations, and how they both deal with the new batch of horrors.
Gone is the weird unevenness and erratic pacing of the original film – Nightwatch: Demons Are Forever is tight and controlled, with Bornedal a much more consistent and focused filmmaker this time around. While a lot of the film ventures outside of the morgue as Emma does her investigation, most of the other environments it visits are equally oppressive and grim, like the insane asylum where the original killer is imprisoned, allowing the film to maintain much more of that energy of anxiety and foreboding. The film is much more strongly character-focused this time, really digging into the psychology of our daughter and father protagonists, while occasionally exploding into cat-and-mouse thriller sequences with the new killer who is at large. In both modes, Fanny Leander Bornedal and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau are excellent. Bornedal is great as the driven and self-possessed young investigator, who is in many ways the opposite of the Coster-Waldau’s scattered, immature, out-of-his-depth young protagonist from the first film. And Coster-Waldau is excellent playing a broken, tragic older version of his previous character, whose life has been consumed by his inner demons. A very different take on Martin, which absolutely makes sense as what he would have grown up into. The supporting cast is great as well, with many returning faces from the first film, which fans will surely appreciate.
While Demons Are Forever is definitely a more consistently strong and satisfying film overall, if there is one place where the original Nightwatch is superior, it is the original film’s first act. That slow build of dread and tension, before we know any of the story details, is just so good. And while the sequel is very well-shot and visually strong in its own right, it is a very modern, digital-looking film, and the original’s beautiful 35mm photography of its spooky liminal visuals is just very hard to beat. In most other respects, though, I found this film to be a solid improvement over its predecessor.
Nightwatch: Demons Are Forever was a very pleasant surprise of a film. My hopes were not high, for a much-belated legacy sequel to a film that is very messy to begin with. Instead I was very happy to find just the right kind of legacy sequel, that builds upon the strengths of the previous film while addressing its weaknesses, and brings a really fascinating set of new themes to the table while it is at it. This is a sequel that makes the first film better, by ending the saga in a way that feels much more strong and consistent, and which echoes back to the first film in all the right ways. I definitely recommend this one, and I think this sequel elevates this box set from a “maybe it’s worth a look” to a “you should probably check these out.”
THE ARROW VIDEO LIMITED EDITION:
The Nightwatch Collection comes to us from Arrow in a limited-edition blu-ray box set. No UHD option for this one, blu only, but personally I don’t think that’s a major problem for these films. Both films look great on these discs: Demons Are Forever of course just comes to us on its 2023 digital HD master, but Nightwatch comes in a beautiful scan which is very filmic, rich in detail, and has gorgeous colors and contrast. Fans should be very happy with the visual presentation of these two films.
The extras are fairly plentiful, especially for the first film, which features a commentary by Ole Bornedal, and interview with the cinematographer, a making-of documentary, and a video essay. The second film just has two visual essays by film scholars, but they are both very good, especially the one by the always-interesting Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. It would have been nice to hear from Bornedal again - perhaps joined by his daughter who is the film's star - and it would have been nice to get interviews with a couple of the recurring actors on this set, like Coster-Waldau and Bodnia, and it seems a bit of a missed opportunity to have not done so. But what is here is excellent.
Overall, fans and newcomers alike should be quite happy with Arrow’s Nightwatch Collection. Collecting both films into a single set was definitely the right idea, since they really do work best as a single cohesive whole. Both films look great, and the discs come with some excellent extras. While I remain very mixed on the first film, it’s probably worth a look, especially since the second film in many ways redeems it and builds on it. After watching the second movie, I enjoyed the experience of having watched both much more. So if you’re into Nordic Noir, these two films are probably a worthwhile double-feature, and Arrow has put together a fantastic package in which to enjoy them.
- Christopher S. Jordan
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