|
Morgues are provocative places. Amid the smell, bottled organs and sealing wax, questions surface: What do I think when I see this dead body? Am I disgusted? Am I frightened by my own mortality? Am I a bad person to look? What if it wakes up? God, that one is so young and pretty. Am I a pervert? Am I inspired by these feelings? Danish writer and director Ole Bornedal was inspired by his feelings. After visiting a morgue in Copenhagen, he wrote and directed Nattevagten. By examining the behavior of a young security guard working in a morgue during a horrendous murder investigation, Bornedal made a Poe-like film that touched a few nerves and asked: Is death the ultimate truth, or does it still contain secrets? Now transfer these feelings and questions to America, where, in our own way, we are all death-obsessed. Who better to help in the process than Steven Soderbergh, who has made many movies about things perverse, including the wonderfully morbid Kafka? What would be better is the original film itself. But rather than aid in the American distribution of Bornedal's picture, Soderbergh adapted the director's screenplay for a new film, still directed by Bornedal, but in English. The result is Nightwatch, an entertaining and magnificently shot bad movie. Like the equally gruesome Dutch film The Vanishing, which George Sluizer redirected for American audiences (Nancy Travis survives being buried alive!), this film lost something important in the translation: the resonating terror of the original film. Despite the charismatic Ewan McGregor as the security guard, the effectively gross Nick Nolte as the paternalistic homicide investigator, and the underused genius Brad Dourif as a snide, drugged-up doctor, Nightwatch is a humorous disappointment. In this version's study of human perversion and fascination with death, we get a lot of oddly laughable situations and an over-the-top performance by Josh Brolin, who must think he's in The Young and the Restless. Without its trite dialogue and weird-to-be-weird murders, this film could have been extraordinary. It's brilliantly shot and the atmosphere is grotesque yet seductive. Shot in Cinemascope--which projects images twice as wide as they are tall--the perspective is so intoxicating that the film is worth seeing simply for the visuals. There's perverse pleasure in watching the sweat-soaked McGregor ride down the morgue's elevator, or the weathered Nick Nolte inspect a corpse's fingernails, or the wrinkled retired security guard just stand grumpily in deep focus. It's perverse because you'll want to look, but not listen. |
