Ole Bornedal/ Denmark/ 2023/ 110 mins
What’s the longest time between the releases of a film and its sequel? Ole Bornedal returns to the morgue that made his name a full 30 years after Nightwatch exposed some more adventurous fans to the world of Scandi noir for the first time. The original, which saw young forensic student Michael (Nicolaj Coster-Waldau) become implicated in a spate of serial murders while working nights in a hospital mortuary, was a slick marriage of mystery with horror in vogue in the wake of Silence of the Lambs, and was fairly successful. But is it worth picking up the story so many years down the line in Linklater-esque fashion? Or should the toe-tag have been left on?
Nightwatch: Demons Are Forever introduces the idea of generational trauma into the mix. Martin (Coster-Waldau) is now a pill-rattled wreck, his despair deepened by the offscreen suicide of his parter Kalinka (Sofie Gråbøl). Yet daughter Emma (Fanny Leander Bornedal, daughter of the director) has picked up the mantle, studying in the same field, and even taking on the same night shifts at the same institution. Martin has somehow kept his and Kalinka’s ordeal at the hands of the killer Dr. Wormer (Ulf Pilgaard) a secret. On discovering the case, Emma goes to visit the now elderly and blind sociopath. Yet her visit kickstarts a series of copycat murders, with Emma and family the ultimate target.
It’s doubtful anyone was clamouring for a sequel to a film that, while well-regarded at the time, has faded from the public consciousness. Even the Ewan McGregor-starring 1997 remake is little remembered. And there isn’t much in Nightwatch: Demons Are Forever to convince audiences old and new that it is a worthy resurrection. The issues the original had remain, such as unlikeable, boorish and underdeveloped characters, and rote psychological insight, remain, though Bornedal has obviously grown as a director of tense set pieces. It also suffers from baffling decision making in the service of a barreling narrative that never stops to breathe lest the audience take a moment to think for a moment and instantly unravel the mystery.
Where Demons Are Forever does improve on the original is in the foregrounding of its female characters. While Coster-Waldau and Kim Bodnia as fellow survivor Jens return, they’re secondary to the story, often there for exposition. Fanny Bornedal does a decent job of wrestling Emma into a semblance of recognisable humanity, despite the script’s insistence on her making the worst possible decision in any given moment. Familiar faces to fans of Danish cinema like Paprika Steen and Sonja Richter also get prominent roles.
In the moment, Nightwatch: Demons Are Forever is a passable psychodrama, but as a property it’s been left behind as the Danish film and TV industry has evolved. It’s a rather simplistic affair that even jettisons the slightly lurid quality the first film contained, leaving a basic thriller that is unremarkable in its storytelling and has little to say about its themes of legacy, grief, and trauma.
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