Insomnia

Director: Christopher Nolan

2002 / 118min / 35mm

For his first big studio film, Nolan remade—and considerably reworked—director Erik Skjoldbjærg’s 1997 thriller about a botched murder investigation under the glaring midnight sun of the Norwegian Arctic, transporting the action to the fishing village of Nightmute, Alaska, where two Los Angeles detectives (Al Pacino and Martin Donovan) have arrived to investigate the murder of a teenage girl, only to be confronted with the increasingly brutal bleariness of long-term sleep deprivation and the taunting presence of a local crime fiction writer (Robin Williams, radiating wily malice). A riveting study in gnawing guilt invested with bleak beauty by DP Wally Pfister, ranked by Nolan as his most underrated film.