Insomnia (15)

Edge of darkness

In Christopher Nolan's new film Insomnia Al Pacino looks all of his 62 years, and appears not to have slept for about 61 of them. He plays Will Dormer, and if that surname doesn't tip us the wink then his crumpled demeanour and stiff-legged gait easily betray a man in chronic need of shuteye. Unfortunately for Will, a veteran detective from the LAPD, he's bound for a small Alaskan town, Nightmute, famous for its halibut fishing and for the seasonal phenomenon of perpetual daylight. That's bad news for the sleep deprived, and by the middle of the picture Will's eyelids droop so heavily it looks as though his dreams are going to start without him.

What's he doing in this place? Well, there's the brutal murder of a teenager to investigate, for one thing. For another, Will and his younger partner Hap (Martin Donovan) seem to be in flight from a horrible stink of corruption back home: internal affairs is on the case of certain Los Angeles cops, and someone has decided that these two would do well to be out of town for a while. Over dinner Hap confesses that he's going to cut a deal with the authorities come what may, and Will, already ill at ease, now has the look of someone who's been slapped in the face with a wet halibut.

Christopher Nolan, who made the ingenious backward-tracking thriller Memento, had a remarkably tough act to follow, but at least his appetite for disorientation has not deserted him. Insomnia is a remake of a 1997 Norwegian thriller in which Stellan Skarsgard played the sleepless cop, and you can see why Nolan was attracted to the material: having shown us a man who can't keep anything in his mind, why not try a man whose mind, baulked by insomnia, can't let anything go? And just as the camera shadowed Guy Pearce as he gropes towards the truth in Memento, so here Pacino is in almost every shot, the lens stalking him as mercilessly as the light which creeps through the blinds of his bedroom window. It's a kind of back-to-front noir: whereas guilt traditionally makes alliance with the dark, here in the land of the midnight sun it's got nowhere to hide.

So it's no small irony that the one time the light absents itself, Will makes a catastrophic blunder. Staking out a suspect in the murder case, the police are given the slip when an Alaskan fog suddenly descends over a rocky shoreline and Will, squinting through the murk, accidentally shoots Hap dead. His immediate instinct is to cover up his mistake and pin it on the fleeing suspect, a plan that starts to go awry when the latter contacts Will to let him know he saw the whole thing: "You and I share a secret – we know how easy it is to kill someone".

At this point I worried that the film itself would start to go awry, forewarned that the suspect is played by Mr Goodwill Hunter himself, Robin Williams. If ever an actor needed a change of direction, it's Williams, and, though the urge to slap his face still burns strong, he gives a compact and creepy performance here as a pulp writer who may have been involved with the murdered girl.

The moral interest of Insomnia resides in the conflicted motivation of the police detective. It's not simply that Will is being compromised in his duty by the prime suspect; we can't be certain that his shooting of his partner really was an accident – Hap's death, after all, would conveniently throw the hounds of internal affairs off the scent. Like Macbeth, Will has murdered sleep, but he hasn't managed to smother his conscience along with it. The person doing most to keep that conscience awake is Ellie Burr (Hilary Swank), a rookie police detective whose puppyish respect for his reputation Will at first teases ("Are you gonna write this down?") before realising that it might be his salvation to help her become a good cop. And his downfall.

When Ellie writes a standard report exonerating Will of any wrongdoing in Hap's death, Will reminds her that the report has her name on it – it's her responsibility to double-check the details, even if that means pointing the finger at one of her own. Hilary Swank brings a winning combination of innocence and grit to the role, her freshness a welcome contrast to Will's battered, hollow-eyed phiz. (Maura Tierney as a sympathetic hotelier does something similar in the film's latter part).

Christopher Nolan keeps puncturing the narrative with rapid little flashes – blood seeping into cotton, purple contusions on flesh, sudden cracks of violence – to convey the impression of a mind like a shattered windscreen, waiting for a single tap that will burst it into tiny fragments.

Insomnia is full of these fine touches, though it isn't quite sly enough to give you sleepless nights. It lacks that "wild card" that Williams' crime writer keeps taunting the detective about. For all Nolan's skill, it doesn't get under your skin in the way that Memento did, perhaps because that film disoriented our own responses and expectations as much as did its protagonist's. But see it for Pacino, who has at last discarded the mannerisms that clung to much of his acting in the Nineties. He once played a burnt-out cop in Sea of Love, but then his character was merely tired of dating; here he's tired of the whole damn shooting match. It's almost as if Nightmute, with its washed-out daylight and lowering skies, has been waiting for Will Dormer to show up. His guilt-racked soul has found the setting it deserves.