Oh what, did you think that only American movies can play the legacy sequel game?
Back in 1994, Ole Bornedal gave us Nightwatch, a tremendously atmospheric psycho thriller that twinned a macabre serial killer with that self destructive notion that young adults have that nothing ever matters and the result was one of the best kept secrets of the 90s. However, even back then it was strangely apparent that the director was keen to return to this world of arrogant youths and necrophile murderers as Bornedal himself returned to helm an Americanised remake with the likes of Ewen McGregor, Nick Nolte and Patricia Arquette only three short years later. The result wasn’t exactly amazing and it seemed that the director’s fascination with these characters had finally come to and end – but even in Danish cinema the saying never say never rings true as nearly thirty years later, Bornedal has decided to revisit the oppressive Forensic Medicine Institute once again to see how everybody has turned out.
It seems that generational trauma is pretty in with the kids in Denmark…
Emma is a medical student who hangs out with a bunch of friends who share her cynical, jaded view of the world in general who are all eager to smugly prove that nothing can possibly phase them – not even sucking a finger that may have been up the butt of a medical cadaver (see the movie for some much needed context). But while Frederik, Sofus and Maria sneer at the world for reasons unknown, Emma’s disdain comes from the emotional dumpster fire that is her parents.
Her mother, Kalinka, hung herself and Emma was the unfortunate one who found her and ever since then, her father, Martin, has spiraled into a fugue state of grief and sedation ever since. However, after a chance discovery of some news clippings that shed some much needed backstory to her parent’s behavior, Emma embarks on a foolhardy quest to get to the bottom of this generational trauma once and for all.
You see, we know what happened (or, at least you would have if you’d seen the original) and the fact that the once headstrong Martin is such a wreck is due to his and Kalinka’s run-in with the twisted Inspector Wörmer who tried to pin his deranged crimes on Martin when he worked as a night watchman at the unfeasibly creepy Forensic Medicine Institute.
After discovering that Wörmer is actually still alive despite being blind and broken in an asylum somewhere, Emma tracks him down and takes her way into his cell to confront him on film in order to snap her father out of his depression, but in doing so, she fires up the attention of a copycat killer who starts targeting the surviving members of Martin’s old friend group – way to go Emma… Having made everything exponentially worse, Emma now has to try and figure out the copycat’s connection to Wörmer before his malevolent influence takes yet another shot at her disheveled father.
Unresolved trauma seems to be the ideal way for thrillers and slashers to dredge up old characters and franchises in order to produce another installment that refreshes and reinvigorates dormant series a treat. Take the last two Scream instalments and the effect thirty years of Ghostface has had on the original cast, or Halloween Ends’ slightly unsuccessful attempt to address the long term damage that Michael Myers has caused to the headspace of the people of Haddonfield for added proof that it’s a sure fire way to crack a story with such a huge gap between installments. It also helps that some of the original actors are fairly well known now too as Nikolaj Coster-Walda saw his global profile soar thanks to Game Of Thrones and Kim Bodina’s returning Jens is also pretty placeable courtesy of his role in Killing Eve and these two familiar faces provide the bedrock of a new adventure that mostly concerns Fanny Leander’s Emma, a student who simply wants her dad to stop hurting.
Of course, the main danger of going down this route is that the story only works at it fullest ebb if you’ve recently seen the first film as the callbacks are only able to hit home at their hardest if you’re actually familiar with what has happened previously, but if you have, if gives Demons Are Forever that extra needed dimension. On the other hand, however, is that those who has seen Bornedal’s skillfully crafted original might find that he’s essentially made a very similar movie that riffs heavily on memorable parts of the first film. In fact, the scene where a decrepit, grumbling member of staff shows Emma around her night watchman route on her first shift at her new job is virtually identical to the first film and while it’s a decent way to hint that parents tend to echo within their own children (especially in movies), some may argue that the director is just merely covering old ground.
But that seems to be Demons Are Forever’s major issue – to be caught in a trade off between finding it’s own identity or walking it’s own path; but then as that’s something that Emma is literally doing to escape her father’s trauma, it actually kind of fits. Still, when compared with the first Nightwatch, Bornedal seems to have made a couple of adjustments three decades on and the main one is that even though Emma and her friends still have that same attitude as Martin and Jens had that nothing could hurt them if they simply didn’t care, this new generation of brats are nowhere near as self destructive and obnoxious. In comparison, the film has less to say about social issues concerning disenfranchised youths and instead leans way more into the slasher aspect, conjuring up some fairly creepy images as it goes. For a start, Wörmer is now a grey-eyed mastermind who is somewhere between Hannibal Lector and Don’t Breathe’s Blind Man and his acolytes are made of of a copycat who wears a rubber effigy of his face and a fellow inmate named Bent who does his bidding. Likewise, while the youths busy themselves with the murderous mystery, the movie gets extra mileage out of how low Martin has sunk from his headstrong twenties and there’s some genuinely touching stuff when he and Jens finally reunite. However, the identity of the copycat isn’t exactly that hard to fathom and despite some shock deaths, it’s fairly standard thriller stuff.
However, it comes at a cost and that is that the sequel simply doesn’t have that spine-twisting atmosphere that made the first film so memorable and thus succeeds more as a simple add-on than a stand-alone experience that can stand on its own two feet.
Still, I can genuinely say I wasn’t bored for a moment while watching the second Nightwatch and some of the lamenting over the nature of trauma and growing old in fear was legitimately touching.
While certainly not a waste of time, Nightwatch: Demons Are Forever is a shift better spent shared with its predecessor rather than letting it wander around in the dark, alone.
🌟🌟🌟
We Have Issues 