Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Ole Bornedal
Starring: Fanny Leander Bornedal, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Kim Bodnia, Ulf Pilgaard, Sonja Richter, Casper Kjær Jensen, Paprika Steen, Nina Rask, Niels
Anders Thorn
*WARNING: This review contains spoilers for 1994's
Nightwatch*
Hollywood has spent much of the past decade reviving long dormant horror
properties through a format that has come to be known as the "legacy
sequel," which usually means bringing back now aging original characters
and pairing them up with young stars. It's a surprise to find a European
movie get the legacy sequel treatment, but that's what we get with Nightwatch: Demons Are Forever, writer/director Ole Bornedal's belated sequel to his 1994 thriller Nightwatch, which he subsequently remade in English as a starring vehicle for
Ewan McGregor in 1997, collaborating with Steven Soderbergh on the
script.
In 1994 Denmark was associated primarily with arthouse cinema, so it
was a surprise to get a straight-up thriller. Bornedal's film could be
seen to have paved the way for the Nordic Noir trend of dark
Scandinavian thrillers that would become hugely popular in the 21st
century. Nightwatch starred a pre-Game of Thrones Nikolaj Coster Waldau as Martin, a young law student who
takes a job as night watchman at Copenhagen's Forensic Medicine
Institute. It's not a job for the easily spooked, as Martin finds
himself left alone with just a morgue full of corpses for company. Some
of those dead bodies are the recent victims of a serial killer known for
scalping the young women he murders. Martin finds himself embroiled in
the killer's antics, leading to a climax in which the killer is revealed
to be police superintendent Peter Wormer (Ulf Pilgaard). Just as
Wormer is about to kill Martin and his girlfriend Kalinka, the maniac
cop is shot dead by Martin's unstable friend Jens (Kim Bodnia),
and everyone lives happily ever after.
Or so it seemed. Despite the original ending on an upbeat note with
Martin and Kalinka tying the knot, Demons Are Forever follows the lead of its American legacy sequel cousins by
bringing trauma into the mix. Martin is now a pill-addicted wreck,
devastated by Kalinka's suicide several years earlier. His 22-year-old
daughter Emma (the director's daughter Fanny Leander Bornedal) has spent the last few years trying to keep her father together while
trying to process her mother's actions. She's unaware of what her
parents went through in '94 until she comes across some newspaper
clippings Martin has held onto. You wouldn't think this would be the
sort of thing a father could hide from his kid - I mean, just how many
serial killers have there been in Copenhagen in the the last three
decades? - but Emma is shocked to learn what happened to her
parents.
When the night watch position once again becomes available at the
infamous Forensic Institute, Emma takes the job, hoping to find answers
to what happened to her parents. Learning that Wormer survived the
shooting, she visits him at the sanitorium where he's spent the past
three decades. Finding a withered, blind old man, Emma films him to show
her father how pathetic Wormer has become, but her actions have grave
consequences when a copycat killer becomes intent on avenging Wormer.
The Danes have become very good at this sort of thing, and their film
industry is the rival of most nations, so it's no surprise to find
that Demons Are Forever is a slick thriller with a lot of production value and some
quality performances. Bornedal fashions some memorable images here,
with Casper Kjær Jensen spectacularly unsettling as Bent, an
unstable young accomplice of Wormer whom we meet in the film's prologue
as he's questioned over what seems like a copycat murder. There are some
nicely rendered stalk and slash sequences, and great use is made of a
mask moulded from Wormer's face which has the look of a decrepit and
jowly Michael Myers. Fanny Bornedal makes for a likeable protagonist and
Pilgaard is terrifying as the elderly Wormer.
But like most legacy sequels, Demons Are Forever struggles to justify its existence and plays more like a
contractual obligation than a passion project. In attempting to please
fans of the original while bringing in a new audience, the film too
often has its older characters tell their younger opposites what
occurred in the '94 movie as though it assumes most of the viewers who
sit down to watch Demons Are Forever won't have seen its predecessor, which may well be the case,
certainly outside Denmark. As a result, every time this sequel is
gaining momentum, it becomes bogged down in some trip down memory lane,
some of which is unearned. I'm thinking particularly of how it handles
the return of Jens, a deeply unlikeable figure whose misogyny in the
original (his degrading treatment of a teenage prostitute really hasn't
aged well) not only went unaddressed but saw him become the hero when
most viewers were probably rooting for his demise. With Demons Are Forever seeking to court progressive Gen-Z attitudes with the inclusion
of a gender ambiguous character in Emma's friend Maria (Nina Rask), you might expect it to reckon with how loathsome Jens is, but the
character hasn't changed his attitudes and it's baffling that Emma
doesn't call out his boorish behaviour.
Demons Are Forever's biggest misstep is in moving the action away from the Forensic
Institute. The location was the original's greatest asset, with much of
that film's tension being generated by how creepy its badly lit
subterranean corridors were. Surprisingly little time is spent there in
the sequel and Emma taking her dad's old job doesn't really make any
difference to the plot. Nightwatch was a classic case of a production with a limited budget being
required to be clever and make the most of a great location. With more
resources at hand here, Bornedal displays little of the creativity of
his breakout thriller. It's certainly superior to recent Hollywood
efforts to revive beloved genre properties and it bears all the surface
quality you expect from today's Danish cinema, but Demons Are Forever never gets under your skin like its grittier predecessor.
Nightwatch: Demons Are Forever is on Shudder from May 17th.
