In the latest installment of our deep dive into Nolan’s work, we look at how one of those changes works to make Dormer’s character less ambiguous, while the other makes his actions more so. The broad strokes resemble Erik Skjoldbjærg’s Swedish and Norwegian-language original, but the 2002 remake foists a pair of Hollywood-esque changes onto the story. For the rest of the film, he’s left with one death to solve, and another to cover up.

However, during a chase obscured by fog - during which the film cuts so rapidly between Dormer and Finch you lose all sense of who is who - Dormer ends up shooting and killing his own partner.

With the help of local cop Ellie Burr (Hilary Swank), they manage to lure a suspect to the scene of the killing: local crime author Walter Finch (Robin Williams). Dormer and his partner Hap Eckhart (Martin Donovan) have been ushered out of the spotlight of an Internal Affairs investigation, and pawned off onto the mysterious murder of a young girl, Kay Connell (Crystal Lowe), whose body was found without a single trace of evidence. detective Will Dormer (Al Pacino) to Nightmute, Alaska, a small fishing village where the sun doesn’t set for six months a year. However, watching Nolan’s final pre-Batman outing also reveals a subtle finessing of his M.O. There are no memory holes or backward timelines, no superhero antics, and no parallel chronologies to decipher. It’s the only one he didn’t have much of a hand in writing (the screenplay was adapted by Hillary Seitz) and, on paper, it’s fairly straightforward. Insomnia, a remake of the 1997 Norwegian thriller of the same name, is one of Christopher Nolan’s least talked about works.

Insomnia film light and dark 1997