I am not one of those horror fans who watched Hellraiser at 8 and instantly fell for the macabre of the movie world. I was a late bloomer. Even so, two movies cut through during my teen years and helped move me from ambivalence to acceptance and later, fandom: Hideo Nakata’s Ring and the much less well-known Danish title, Nightwatch (1994, Dir. Ole Bornedal). Both have oppressive, haunting atmospheres – world’s away from the general tone of 1990s horror and are integral figures in forming a cinematic language that would go on to be dubbed Liminal horror. Ring worked the format end of liminal horror, and Nightwatch did it for spaces as a night watchman worked a night shift in a morgue as things take a turn for the terrifying.
Ring has had a life way beyond the confines of that breakout J-Horror hit, with it having another franchise running concurrently based on Koji Suzuki’s novels and a few Korean movies. Nightwatch blazed a short trial cut to a close by the less-than-impressive remake with Ewan McGregor (also directed by Bornedal). So out of the conversation was Nightwatch that most forgot about its existence (which is a shame as it was genuinely chilling), all this makes the fact that it now has a legacy sequel from the original director more than a little surprising. Subtitled Demons are Forever, this new Nightwatch falls in a very different cultural landscape for Denmark and Scandinavia at large, thanks to the rise, fall and rise of the Nordic Noir. A subcategory of literature and TV that Wikipedia defines “as crime fiction usually written from a police point of view and set in Scandinavia or the Nordic countries. Nordic noir often employs plain language, avoiding metaphor, and is typically set in bleak landscapes”. It’s in that where we find the latest Shudder original.
Like Scream and many before it, this legacy sequel projects the events of the past onto the next generation, specifically the daughter of the surviving Martin (a returning Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) – Emma (Fanny Leander Bornedal). He is a mess of anxiety and PTSD, numbed and dulled by medication. She wants to know more about her family’s past, especially after she was the one to find her mother’s body after she committed suicide and newspaper clippings of the original movies fateful night that her dad was keeping. In classic horror form, Emma goes poking where she shouldn’t, visiting the asylum where the killer her parents barely survived (who is blind and feeble from decades of institutionalisation) is imprisoned. Her attempt to confront and minimise her father’s trauma truly kicks the hornet’s nest, as we see multiple murders, kidnappings and more twists than you can shake an M.Night Shyamalan at.
Demons are Forever is absolutely a long-form narrative with its wings clipped. This fact is not well disguised, the scars common in other titles creatively and financially cropped are as plain as day.
While ostensibly well made as we have come to expect from a national industry responsible for some of the moodiest, grimmest and starkest police procedurals of the past 20 years, Nightwatch: Demons are Forever carries some of the less favourable Nordic Noir baggage. Nordic Noir works best as either a novel spread out over 100s of pages or a long-form TV serial; it doesn’t have the same zest within the confines of a cinematic runtime. This is even more troublesome when Bornedal’s return to Nightwatch dedicates much of its running time to addressing the emotions of survivors, which while well-acted and thoughtful isn’t what you’d expect from a re-visitation to one of the most taut chillers of the 1990s.
A consequence of trying to tell a long story in a short form sees plot developments and character dynamics come out of the blue making next to no sense. What’s more, instead of dedicating all the necessary time to make these twists work within the narrative, there’s a section where Martin and his saviour and best friend (from the first movie) have a kick around inside of (what I can only assume is) FC Kopenhagen’s home ground. The way the script doles out climatic information is deeply jarring to the extent that any of the directions the story pulls in feels awkward. Demons are Forever is absolutely a long-form narrative with its wings clipped. This fact is not well disguised, the scars common in other titles creatively and financially cropped are as plain as day. As bad as that may be, the most damaging blow for me came from the lead character having next to no self-preservation skills to the point where it becomes hard to relate – skipping plot beats can do that to a character.
While deeply flawed, it is not to say that the movie is without its triumphs. While not as potent as its forebearer, albeit rare whenever events hit the morgue or the psychiatric institution home to the original killer (Wormer – Ulf Pilgaard), there is an unsettling atmosphere that clinically avoids jump-scare cliches. Credit has to go to cinematographer Lasse Frank Johannessen, who beautifully frames and lenses the movie, making the most of its status as a legacy sequel to an atmospheric chiller. It is consistently well-acted by the entire cast. However, the vividly characterised supporting cast threatens to steal the show; Casper Kjær Jensen as the (‘baby robot-like’) killer Bent has a childlike naivete that would be fascinating to dig deeper into, only he (or it as he mysteriously repeats) becomes irrelevant in the third act. The quirky double act of Nina Terese Rask (Maria) and Sonny Lindberg (Sofus) constantly overwhelm the central cast with their hugely charismatic turns. All of this results in a perfectly entertaining thriller, but given who its older sibling is – it deserved more.
Given how events play out with its lack of clear progression for the antagonists, it is impossible to watch Demons Are Forever and not come away believing it would’ve worked better as a 6-8 episode mini-series, maybe retaining a bit more mystery wouldn’t have gone amiss either. That or cutting it down to fit a tight 90. But such is the nature of the indie genre space, you rarely get to make the project your heart desired and have to make concessions, sometimes those concessions work, most of the time they don’t.
NightWatch: Demons are Forever are out now on Shudder
Rob’s Archive – Nightwatch: Demons are Forever
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