Critics reviews

Insomnia is a complex drama, yet executed with great stylistic economy and simplicity, through which Skjoldbjærg and his collaborators—including cowriter Nikolaj Frobenius—develop a profound sense of enigma. The visual style, notably the use of whiteness, constantly evokes the unreadability of Engström's psyche, reversing the convention of identifying the unconscious with darkness.

Insomnia is so humorless (okay, the kittens line isn't half bad), that its significance beyond a stylistic calling card becomes an illumination the film ironically cannot disguise. Nevertheless, Skjoldbjærg's eye for composition and remarkable play with a muted, mostly gray-scale color scheme complement Engström's insanity nicely, though this remains a film more notable for its unique setting and bizarro scenario than an accomplished genre work of deeper, underlying convictions.

Vastly superior to Christopher Nolan's implausible, cutty remake, Erik Skjoldbjærg's bleak, black thriller, set in the whiteness of the far north, charts the moral disintegration of a detective tracking a murderer and excavating the moral vacuum in his own heart. Crisp procedural storytelling with a gnawing decay underneath.

Repressed and unctuous yet oddly handsome and sickly swaggering, [Skarsgård] gives a performance so compelling that one could easily picture him as Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. Skjoldbjaerg did right in casting Skarsgård, for the director's vision of a man being suffocated by light would not have worked with a predictably "disturbing" actor.

...This icy crime thriller rejects the clichs of the genre-particularly as it's practiced by American filmmakers-in almost every way... Insomnia is haunting rather than jolting; an ice pick to the heart rather than a pump-you-up roller-coaster ride.

The style of director and cowriter Erik Skjoldbjaerg in this first feature is clipped and crisp, and much is made of the action's transpiring inside the arctic circle during the season when there's no night, but I had a much easier time nodding off than the hero. It's nice to see a genre film from abroad for a change, but I would have preferred one with an interesting character or two, not to mention a livelier plot.

The film probably comes closer than anything else to serving as a pure vehicle for his somber talents. His Jonas is one of the most tortured heroes, or antiheroes, if you prefer, you are ever likely to see on the screen... Insomnia is ultimately less a mystery of detection than a meditation on guilt, crime and punishment in a senseless world. Mr. Skarsgard's skill as an actor enables us to perceive his punishment as a form of spiritual solitude.