Review of Nightwatch (1994)
Seen in 2025.
Rather than beg his parents for money, a law student gets a job as night watchman at the local hospital. His rounds include the morgue, and his best friend likes to push his buttons.
When I was a young man, around the age of the characters in this movie and a student myself, I had a summer job. I was a custodian of sorts at the regional hospital in the town where I grew up. My title was vaktmästare, “watchman”, but I mostly pulled trains of food and trains of rubbish in the tunnels, behind my electric tractor. On weekends, when the regular staff left the morgue quiet, I had additional duties. One day, there was an incident. I was instructed, by phone, to find another young man, and wheel him into a particular room.
That young man’s corpse was not where it should have been.
Ole Bornedal’s Nattvakten already existed, but I only saw it two decades later, 31 years after it was made. Seeing it did not remind me of my own experience, because its general verisimilitude is poor. At one point, the main character is accused of having desecrated the morgue in the night, but the first he hears of this is the next night, and the police doesn’t show up to investigate until later. That doesn’t make sense, because in the intervening day, the hospital has been fully staffed. Nightwatch is not a realistic film. It’s in a genre where nothing significant can occur without the main character. Unsurprisingly, it’s metafictional, and so poorly constructed in this regard that its international title is given in dialogue, in broken Danish English, as Nightguard. Don’t come for the writing. Come for Dan Laustsen’s lovely cinematography and the moments of comedic acting in between the long stretches of nominal horror.