Second Sight’s Insomnia 4K UHD Review: The Film That Beat Nolan to It

I watched Christopher Nolan’s Insomnia before I watched the original. I was in my early twenties. I thought the film was fine and I moved on. It took me until Second Sight dropped this 4K edition to find out what fine had been covering up for twenty four years. I feel pretty bad about that. Not bad enough to not tell you to skip Nolan and start here, but bad.

Erik Skjoldbjærg’s 1997 original is a Norwegian thriller about a Swedish detective named Jonas Engström who goes to Tromsø to investigate a teenage girl’s murder and instead dismantles himself in daylight. Stellan Skarsgård plays Jonas. He is not a good man doing a bad thing. He is a man who was already doing bad things who then does a worse one, and the film is about watching him hold that together under a sun that will not go down.

The Sun Is the Monster Here

Skjoldbjærg called it “a reversed film noir with light instead of darkness as its dramatic force,” and that is exactly right, and also a polite way of saying the Arctic summer is doing something genuinely horrible to this movie. Tromsø in June means no night. No dark corner. No 3am where you can tell yourself it was a dream.

Cinematographer Erling Thurmann-Andersen shoots the whole thing overexposed and grey, and in the new 4K restoration that greyness lands like a fist. Every interior feels too bright. Every window is a problem. Jonas cannot sleep, cannot hide, cannot find a single hour that looks different from the one before it. That is the film’s horror, and it is more effective than it has any right to be.

What Skarsgård Actually Does

The performance does not announce itself. That is the whole thing. Skarsgård plays Jonas going still when he should flinch, pausing a half-beat too long before answering simple questions, watching every room he enters with the focus of a man who needs to know who in it already knows. He is calculating. He is also dissolving.

Roger Ebert compared the film to Dostoevsky when it opened stateside in 1998. The Crime and Punishment parallel is real, with one difference, Raskolnikov is tormented almost immediately. Jonas keeps choosing not to be. That is the colder read and the better film.

What Nolan Did With It

The 2002 remake moved everything to Alaska, added about 20 minutes, and made the detective a fundamentally decent man destroyed by circumstance. Al Pacino does the thing Pacino does. Robin Williams is genuinely unsettling in a way the film earns. Hilary Swank does more with her role than the script deserves. It is a competent Hollywood thriller and I have not thought about it since I watched it.

The key structural difference, in Nolan’s version, the detective dies. Some weight lifted. In the original, Jonas lives. Goes home. Carries it. That is the correct ending and the more disturbing one, and I will not call it a spoiler because you needed to know.

About This Release

Second Sight did not cut corners. The 4K restoration carries a director-approved HDR grade with Dolby Vision, and Thurmann-Andersen’s washed-out oppressive whites have never looked this punishing. The dual format edition puts the feature and bonus material on both the UHD and Blu-ray, which is a small detail that collectors notice and appreciate.

The physical package is a rigid slipcase with new art by Peter Strain, a 120-page book with essays from Jenn Adams, Mitchell Beaupre, Barry Forshaw, Francesco Massaccesi, Priscilla Page, and Travis Woods, and six collector art cards. The book reads like it was commissioned from people who actually watched the film. That sounds like a low bar. It is not.

What Is on the Discs

The audio commentary with Skjoldbjærg and co-writer Nikolaj Frobenius is the feature you will come back to. A director revisiting his debut nearly thirty years out has usually dropped the defensiveness and kept the honesty, and this one has that quality. Two new interviews accompany it: “Running on Instinct” with Skjoldbjærg, and “Falling Into It” with producer Petter J. Borgli. The producer interview fills in context the film itself never bothers to explain.

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas contributes a piece called “Private Prisons” that treats the film analytically without treating it as a sacred object. Three of Skjoldbjærg’s short films are included: Spor, Close to Home, and Near Winter. Watch those first if you want to know where Insomnia came from.

Buy It or Don’t

If you have never seen this film, the answer is yes. Full stop.

If you own the Criterion edition and you are doing upgrade math. The restoration is the definitive visual presentation and the commentary is new material unavailable anywhere else. Whether that moves the needle depends on you.

Insomnia is a Norwegian film about guilt dressed as a detective story. Jonas Engström did not need the midnight sun to lose his mind. He was already most of the way there.