In the town of Nightmute, Alaska - "The halibut fishing capital of the world" - where the sun shines on through the wee hours of the night - where essentially there is no night, just a time that isn't formally day - where folks from all over go to escape from "real" life - where folks born there yearn desperately to escape - where cold bodies of water and even colder empty spaces are king - where nature has its devilish way with you - in this town, there has been a murder. No, not exactly just a murder, rather a sickening crime, an unutterable violation upon innocence, and unquestionably the work of a mad man - you see, he washed the girl's hair and filed her nails (both fingers and toes) before encasing her in plastic and leaving her with the trash. And so in a place where grisly murders performed by ritual killers are as common as moonlight in summertime, an outsider needs to be brought it in to make things whole again. In walks Will Dormer (Al Pacino) and his partner Hap Eckhart (Martin Donovan), both sent from L.A. to teach these Eskimos a thing or two about police-work - how a corpse is examined, how a crime-scene is analyzed, how a killer is trapped. Only problem is that all people in Nightmute are either born there or come escaping something, as one hotelkeeper tells Dormer, and these two detectives were not born there.
 

This is where the audience sits for two hours: We are outsiders arriving in Nightmute; our brains need adjusting to the endless daylight - and the process is exhausting, but the investigation needs to continue….so we move on without resting.
 

A young idealistic local cop named Ellie Burr (Hilary Swank, deserved Oscar winner from Boys Don't Cry) is awestruck by the arrival of her hero, Dormer, and is juiced to be on the case with him. She tells him that she usually gets stuck with misdemeanors and other unchallenging work. He looks over to her confident, beaming face with his black eyes that have seen everything from every angle and tells her that all police work is the same - it's a study of the details.

Christopher Nolan, coming off his major league directorial debut, Memento, is out there proving that he knows a thing or two about details. He knows that if you are filming in the wonderland of Alaska, you use it - you absorb the majestic chunks of ice and frozen rivers and tall green pines and vast openness, you inject the scenery into celluloid strips, and you lay it out there like a six course desert. He studies insomnia (the disease) and uses sound manipulation and visual trickery to take us on a journey without sleep for one hundred and forty four hours. He lets an actor think on screen -"something" doesn't always need to be going on for the story to be moving. And as we already know from Memento, he knows how to flashback.

Like Memento, this is affectively another movie about looking backwards, but unlike Memento there is purpose to the rearview glance and then dealing with what you see there. Memento was showy entertainment masterfully handled. Insomnia is a study in regret and a reckoning with the ghosts of the past haunting the present and what a man will do to silence their condemnation. The Alaskan backdrop and the theme of sleeplessness merely enhance the atmosphere and make this a much better movie than it would have been otherwise. After all, it does not take much to connect the dots from a guilty conscience to nights without peaceful rest. So we watch Dormer wrestle with his demons day and "night" and his grief and torment are ceaseless like the great fiery orb lighting the sky. We also watch to see if he will corrupt himself further in dealing with the killer, Walter Finch (Robin Williams, convincingly evil, but not as psychotic as the ads will have you think), who is one of the more complex villains you will find in this day and age, considering that at times you will not be sure if he is a villain.

Insomnia is striking because it is content to be quiet and deep despite its stellar cast (do you know what it means to have Al Pacino raise his voice only once in an entire movie!? - not to mention Robin Williams not overacting - this is phenomenal). The film is creepy, and not because of any one particular scene or moment, but because Nolan takes us, body and soul, into a place that all is illuminated all the time and there is no escape under the cover of darkness. A place where the fall of man is suffered - where hiding is meaningless - where the truth becomes a fog and the fog is all encompassing - where there in no making amends - and where sleep is impossible.