Insomnia

From first-time Swedish director Erik Skjoldbjaerg comes this disturbing, expertly rendered neo-noir cop flick. The ubiquitous but incomparable Stellan Skarsgård (Amistad, Breaking the Waves) plays Engstrom, a Swedish detective investigating a teenage girl's murder in a small town near Oslo. Engstrom's reputation for ruthless fact-checking precedes him, and the local Norwegians are awestruck. But some undescribed recent trauma has him on the edge of a breakdown; he is dumfounded by the killer's methodical cleanliness, and he broods on the victim's youth and beauty. As if that weren't enough, it's high summer in the land of the midnight sun. Sleep-deprived, losing his grip on reality, Engstrom botches a near-perfect opportunity to nab the killer . . . and his partner winds up dead. What follows is a stunningly portrayed descent into moral and mental corrosion, wherein the line separating hunter and hunted blurs rapidly.

With minimal violence (four gunshots), and a clever mise-en-scène that inverts the expected film noir metaphor (here light rules), Insomnia is poised to infuse the contemporary crime-thriller genre with cool Nordic cunning. Skjoldbjaerg's taut pacing and calculated visuals have prompted comparisons to the Coen Brothers. But there is little of the black humor or cartoonish gore of Blood Simple or Fargo here, only a film that manages to be intimate and heart-rending as often as it is cold-blooded. At the Avon.

-- Peg Aloi