All Things Thriller

Of course, everyone has seen Strangers on a Train, the quintessential psychological thriller by the master, Alfred Hitchcock. Quintessential not because it is the best, though it is deservedly in the top 2o of just about every cinephile’s list, but because it is the best representation of the genre through the lens of its elements: light verses dark, the shades of gray in-between, twinning, egocentric love and hate, the physical, dogged pursuit of control, the fear and anguish of losing it.

In fact, in all of cinema, no director’s cannon is more ubiquitously symbiotic with the psychological thriller than Hitchcock’s, with the possible exception of the great Ingmar Bergman. (That the latter’s work tilts more toward drama is duly noted.) Still, it is interesting that Erik Skjoldbjaerg, director of the equally quintessential new wave Scandinavian psycho-thriller Insomnia (1997), tips his hat not so much to his fellow Swede, but to the Englishman.

Bleak. Intriguing. Haunting. Insomnia is more noir-like than Strangers on a Train. It is also more economical with action and more reliant on atmosphere and rumination. In this way, more like Bergman.

Yes, there are chases, combat and gunplay–but not because they are formulaic. Here realism trumps style. Action is the consequence of physics.

In Strangers on a Train, the plot coalesces around a complicated conspiracy between two men, one of them as fundamentally decent as he is desperate to find a way out of circumstances orchestrated by the other, a sadistic psychopath. Their conspiracy represents the intrusion of evil, via circumstance and stress, into an otherwise stable psyche. Insomnia is about much the same thing, but here the conspiracy is less grandiose, while the conspirators are similarly troubled souls– one a cop, the other his quarry.

Jonas Engstrom (Stellan Skarsgard) is the cop, a high ranking homicide detective; a star of sorts–this in spite a rather public incident in which a skeleton escaped his closet. Thus he’s sent to a snow drift above the Arctic Circle in the hinterlands of Norway, tasked with leading the investigation into the murder of a seventeen year old girl. The local cops are worried; the killer’s MO is sophisticated and there are possible signatures pointing to serial homicide.

In Tromso, he is assigned to a reginal supervisor, Hilde Hagan (Gisken Armand) with whom he may or may not have history. Though friendly, even coy–like Strangers’ provocative Barbara (Patricia Hitchcock)–she is leery of him too.

Taciturn, enigmatic, clocked in steely attractiveness and stylish attire, Engstrom is not an easy man to like. He makes insensitive comments about untoward observations of which he either thinks are funny, or doesn’t bat an eye.

His male colleagues whisper behind his back. Hagan does not.

Engstrom checks into an inn where a no nonsense, yet comely clerk is attracted to him. Appreciating that he doesn’t hit her up for drinks or intrude on her personal space with innuendos, she mistakes his uneasiness for politeness. She gives him tape so that he can fix the shade to the window. Daylight is as unrelenting as the temperatures are cool in the city of Tromso–the phenomenon of the midnight sun.

As Engstrom makes the rounds of his investigation, attending the dead girls autopsy–her name is Tanja–sifting through belongings that are too expensive for her to afford, interviewing school mates, getting rough with an uncooperative boyfriend, the ever present sheen of sweat above his top lip spreads across his face. This despite snow still visible in summer. The tape isn’t working. And Engstrom is a man who needs what little sleep his is accustomed to.

Increasingly erratic, he is unable to suppress his inner tawdriness. When the comely hotel clerk makes an advance, his response is inappropriately aggressive. He reacts similarly with Froya, a cynical, world weary teen who he intimidates into disclosing the identity of Tanja’s fifty-something suitor.

His name is Jon Holt (Bjorn Floberg), a writer of pulp fiction, a man of means though he no longer looks it. Gamy. Desolate. Frayed. In him, Engstrom meets his match. More harbinger than doppelganger, Holt is older than his pursuer. That he isn’t as smart is of little consequence. He knows Engstrom’s secrets; he has the receipts.

Unlike the sadistic Bruno (Robert Walker), who relishes Guy’s (Farley Granger) predicament in Strangers on a Train, he takes no pleasure in witnessing Engstrom’s pain or doling out his punishment. When Engstrom announces his plan to frame Tanja’s boyfriend, Holt’s piercing blue eyes blink before they film over, first with surprise and then with empathy.

In his full length picture debut, Skjoldbjaerg turns the essence of noir upside down. Here sunlight pervasively penetrates and darkness is largely confined to the mind, so demons are left to crouch in coastal Tromso’s atmospheric fog more than shadow. Fittingly Skjoldbjaerg films within the glare of white on white–curtains, walls, latex gloves, blanched skin–and in miry hues of seafoam, sage, cornflower and slate. It is a sickly pallet offset with pops of richness.

The camera work is largely straightforward, giving Insomnia a weathered, wind swept look. But Skjoldbjaerg embellishes Engstrom’s sleep deprivation induced psychosis with hallucinatory jump cuts, filmed from angles that blur his perspective of time, space and place, as well as his sense of self.

All this begs the question, is Insomnia really a thriller?

And is Skjoldbjaeg really channeling Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train?

In one of the only sequences filmed in darkness, Engstrom chases the killer through a bunker and we are reminded of Bruno pursuing Miriam in a boat through the tunnel of love. There, Hitchcock ratchets up the tension by using a night time setting against a continuum of light: the glare of carnival rides; silvery flashes in the tunnel; the subtle glow of a lighter. Though Miriam is aware she is being pursued and who is pursuing her, she is unaware she’s being stalked. Sexually charged, she looses sight of Bruno and her head is on a swivel. He is chasing her and she is chasing him.

In the bunker scene, the chase is on foot. Engstrom doesn’t know who the killer is, having seen him only from a distance. The killer escapes into a bunker and Engstrom, with cohorts in tow, runs after him toward the light at the end. But when he gets there he finds it isn’t really light–it’s fog. He disappears into it where he is unable to discern who is who, and who is chasing who.

If that’s not an homage to Hitchcock and, more specifically, Strangers on a Train, I’ll eat Erik Skjoldbjaerg’s hat.