Insomnia (2002)

There's a moment in Insomnia where Al Pacino stares at the ceiling of his hotel room, curtains pinned shut against the relentless Alaskan daylight seeping through every gap, and you can feel his mind beginning to fray at the edges. That image alone tells you everything about what Christopher Nolan is going for here: a detective story where the real enemy isn't the killer, it's the light itself, and the guilt it refuses to let you bury in the dark.

Pacino plays Will Dormer, a veteran LAPD detective shipped up to a remote Alaskan town to investigate the murder of a teenage girl. He's already carrying something heavy before he even lands, a shadow of professional misconduct hovering over him back home. Then the midnight sun arrives and sleep becomes impossible, and whatever internal architecture he'd built to keep himself functioning starts to collapse. It's one of Pacino's finest performances, and I mean that with full seriousness. This isn't the big, scenery-chewing Pacino of later years. It's restrained, hollow-eyed, genuinely haunted. He looks exhausted in a way that no amount of makeup achieves on its own.

And opposite him, Robin Williams. I think people forget quite how unsettling he is here. There's no warmth, no improvisational spark, none of the things we associated with him at the time. What he gives instead is a kind of smooth, considered menace, a man who speaks in reasonable tones while saying deeply unreasonable things. It's a performance that reframes what Williams was capable of, and it makes every scene they share feel like two people circling a drain together.

The film is beautifully put together for the most part. The Arctic landscape is shot with a cold, bleached beauty that makes the world feel wrong, overexposed, stripped of the shadows where a guilty conscience might normally hide. Hans Zimmer's score runs beneath the whole thing like a low-grade fever, never quite breaking into full melody, just humming with dread. And the screenplay layers its moral questions carefully. Dormer isn't simply good or bad. He's compromised, and the film is patient enough to let that complication breathe.

If you've spent time with Nolan's earlier work, like I have with Memento (2000), you'll recognise this preoccupation with guilt and fractured perception. The mechanics are different but the obsessions are the same. And for Pacino, if you want to see the full range of what he brings to morally corroded cops and complicated men, I'd also point you toward Cruising (1980), which has a similarly queasy atmosphere, even if the two films are very different beasts.

Where Insomnia stumbles is in its final act. After two thirds of taut, psychologically rich storytelling, the climax arrives and something deflates. It tips into more conventional thriller territory when it should have been pushing further inward, pressing harder on the moral wound it's spent the whole film opening up. The resolution isn't bad, exactly, but it's tidier than the film deserves. After all that careful, grinding tension, you want something that hits like a verdict. What you get feels more like a procedural wrap-up.

And I'll be honest: if this film didn't have Pacino and Williams doing what they do, and if the craft around them weren't so consistently strong, the final act would hurt the score a lot more. It's the performances and the atmosphere that keep it elevated in memory even when the ending fails to land with the weight it's earned. The whole thing feels like a novel that closes a chapter too quickly after spending pages and pages in agonising, brilliant detail.

Not Nolan's finest film, and I'd point to The Prestige (2006) or The Dark Knight (2008) if you want him working at full pitch. But Insomnia is far from forgettable. It's a film that genuinely gets under your skin, that makes weariness feel contagious, and that contains two performances worth returning to on their own terms. A haunting, intelligent thriller that just loses its nerve when it matters most.

Four stars.

Rating: ★★★½  | Year: 2002  | Watched: 2025-10-27

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Related on Movies With Macca

More from Christopher Nolan: The Prestige (2006) · Inception (2010) · Memento (2000) · The Dark Knight Rises (2012)
More with Al Pacino: Scent of a Woman (1992) · Cruising (1980) · Scarecrow (1973) · Hangman (2017)
More from the 2000s: Kirikou and the Wild Beasts (2005) · Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004) · Daredevil (2003) · Apocalypto (2006)
More thriller: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) · Angst (1983) · The Long Walk (2025) · Punishment Park (1971)
More crime: A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Angst (1983) · Stolen Face (1952) · Cairo Station (1958)