Christopher Nolan’s Al Pacino/Robin Williams thriller is deeply underrated

I’m going to guess that for most people reading this, the 2002 thriller Insomnia never came to mind in any of those categories, even though all three of those legendary Hollywood figures are at the absolute top of their game in that film, with Pacino and Williams delivering complex, interesting performances, while Nolan tells a tight, tense, nuanced story.

Insomnia is set in Nightmute, Alaska during spring, the time of year when the sun never sets. Much like the horror movie 30 Days of Night makes use of continuous darkness to tell its vampire story, Insomnia uses perpetual daylight — paired with a bright white, snowy setting — to explore how sleeplessness affects the mind.

Not being able to sleep is a particular problem for the film’s lead character, LAPD detective Will Dormer (Pacino) who’s sent to Nightmute along with his partner, Hap Eckhart (Martin Donovan), to help the local police department solve the murder of a teenage girl, Kay Connell. This assignment comes as both Dormer and Eckhart are being investigated by internal affairs for planting evidence in another case. It’s also clear that Dormer is guilty, and Eckhart is going to testify against him, leading to tension in their partnership.

The narrative really heats up during an early scene where Dormer and other officers are pursuing Kay’s killer, Walter Finch (Williams), through an Alaskan forest blanketed in thick fog. Dormer, thinking he’s firing at Finch, accidentally shoots and kills Eckhart. From there, Dormer tries to cover up his responsibility for his partner’s death while Finch, the only witness, repeatedly tries to blackmail Dormer into helping him get away with Kay’s murder. And given Dormer’s moral ambiguity and increasingly bothersome insomnia, it’s unclear which way he’ll go.

While this movie isn’t as mind-bendy as signature Nolan works like Inception and Interstellar, which came well after Insomnia, or even the told-backward thriller Memento, which came before it, Insomnia isn’t just a straightforward thriller, either. While it does deliver on all the tension and excitement the best of that genre demands, its point of view through a morally questionable, sleep-deprived cop gives it a unique perspective of disorientation, as well as the sense that the walls are closing in on Dormer.

As Dormer, Pacino is doing the kind of work that made him one of the most respected actors of all time. In the beginning of the film, before he’s lost too much sleep, Dormer is confident and even a bit of a charming mentor to local young detective Ellie Burr (Hilary Swank). But as the movie progresses, you feel his exhaustion, and the increasing shortsightedness that results. Not many actors can portray “sleepy” without ever dipping to “boring,” but Pacino does it here without issue — Dormer’s ever-thickening mental fog just makes him more interesting as the film goes on.

Williams is similarly doing some of his best dramatic work, with none of the comedic flourish he’s most remembered for. Instead, he’s cold, quiet, and subtly contradictory. His character seems to want to be a criminal mastermind who uses the police to his own advantage, but the diluted part of him that killed in a fit of rage is also evident. While there is no big scene where we see that side of him come out, we feel it under the surface every time the character speaks, like he’s a pot that’s just about to boil over. While that might sound unsatisfying, it isn’t: Walter’s disquieting calmness is his most defining feature.

But with everyone doing such great work, why has this film largely been forgotten? After all, it did receive critical praise upon its release, and all three of these major players remain relevant in the cultural landscape. My guess is that part of it is a bit of bad timing, at least when it comes to Pacino and Williams. While Pacino is doing great work in this film, it came during a point in his career when he was choosing a lot of sub-par, same-y films like The Recruit and Righteous Kill, where he also played a police officer. As a result, another cop performance — especially a subtler one like this — may have gotten lost in the shuffle.

For Williams, after his 1997 Oscar win for Good Will Hunting, his dramatic chops were widely recognized, so it wasn’t too surprising to see him, at this point in his career, pick up any kind of dramatic role. However, the same year that Insomnia came out, he played another quiet, disturbed psychopath in One Hour Photo. While Insomnia is the better film, his One Hour Photo performance was more memorable: Williams completely changed his appearance for the role, and he played was the lead character, while Insomnia used him in a supporting capacity. That might explain why it was overshadowed.

As for Nolan, this was just his third film, and his first after his breakthrough with Memento. Since then, he’s made far bigger waves with nearly every movie he’s delivered, from changing the superhero genre with Batman Begins and The Dark Knight to challenging his audiences with inventive, high-concept pieces like Inception. Insomnia is also a remake of a Norwegian film, and the only film Nolan has directed that he didn’t also have a hand in writing, which seems to make it a somewhat less personal work.

Image: Warner Brothers/Everett Collection

And while Nolan makes the film’s sense of sleeplessness especially interesting, it’s probably the only Nolan film that didn’t need to be directed by him to get a similar result. Had Insomnia been handled by another skilled director known for psychological thrillers — say, David Fincher or Darren Aronofsky — they likely would have yielded a comparable result.

Regardless, Insomnia deserves far more recognition. It’s a well-directed, well-acted thriller that holds an important place in Nolan, Williams, and Pacino’s filmographies. For Nolan, it came at a time when he was still proving himself as a director, and it helped advance his still-young career. For Williams, Insomnia contains one of his scariest performances. And as for Pacino, sure, the man has played a lot of cops — like, a lot of them — but insomniac Detective Will Dormer is one of the most psychologically complicated ones, even if he doesn’t yell quite as loudly as Serpico does.

Insomnia is available for rental or purchase on Prime Video, Apple TV and YouTube.