17-year-old Tanja is found murdered in the Norwegian town of Tromsø. Kripos police investigators Jonas Engström (Stellan Skarsgård) and Erik Vik are flown in to the Land of the Midnight Sun. The body has been washed clean. Jonas was in the Swedish police until he was caught in bed with a key witness. As they close in on the suspect, Engström accidentally kills his own partner Vik in the fog and then tries to cover it up. He is suffering from insomnia.The continuous sunlight is a fascinating addition to the noir genre. The foggy shootout is filled with compelling tension. I do wish that the bullet and the gun is laid out more simply in one easy exposition. The investigating officer should have laid out all the evidence of the shootout. Was it a through and through? What's the caliber? Somebody needed to CSI that thing. I kept wondering about the situation of the investigation throughout the movie which left me a little perplex. Stellan Skarsgård brings a compelling paranoid disturbed presence. It's an artfully done thriller.

In a Norwegian city with a 24-hour daylight cycle a Swedish murder investigator has been brought in on a special case. Sleep deprived, he makes a horrible mistake which is discovered by the killer he has been hunting.My familiarity with Scandinavian film is rather limited, but if this is any indication of where the region was in the 1990s, maybe they deserve a closer look. This is colored beautifully, with some hazy blues to add mood, but also incredibly gritty and dark in its own way.I need to look into this more, as well as the short films of the director. Maybe, just maybe, this is an area that needs more recognition.

Jonas Engstrom is not enjoying his business trip to northern Norway. Several problems plague him, he can't sleep because of the 24 hour daylight, the murderer he was brought into apprehend is steeped in police procedure (damn you CSI!) and he accidentally shot his partner and good friend and left him to die on a foggy, barren ice field. That last thing really put a damper on the trip. To really enjoy the film, you have to keep in mind Engstrom is a remarkably smart detective and ignore the fact that had he just requested to move to a hotel room without a window and been upfront about the accidental shooting (which even the murderer points out to him) everything would have worked out fine. The film feels like it gives you a lot longer than its 96 minute run time to practice your suspension of disbelief skills yet somehow after the last cheesy special effect that ends the movie you feel like you watched an episode of a British detective procedural rather than a theatrical release.

I don't understand why anybody would like to make a remake of an almost perfect film, i.e. a narrative in pictures. The scenery matches so cleverly the callousness of the story, and of the protagonists; the parallels between the policeman and the author is so well done, the sheer coincidence of the events. The only "warm" place is in the hotel reception, by Maria Bonnevie. Skarsgård, but above all Ousdal, are superb, pity that Ousdal has to be killed. Pacino is good, but the film is not. i.e. in comparison to the origin. The use of close-ups are most intelligent and the dialog matches the the tragic story - everything in our lives happen by chance.Christer Dahlqvist