Nightwatch (Nattevagten)

 In a deliciously perverse touch (in a movie that's full of all sorts of perverse details), the morgue Martin (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, in his first film role) starts working in as a nightwatchman has pull-cords on each of its mortuary slabs attached to an alarm system installed in his office. In case any mistakes were made, you see; I guess the architect in charge had read a little too much Poe.

 That's not the only morbid little detail. As his ghoulish predecessor gives him the tour, he also mentions that a former co-worker who got a little too friendly with the deceased. I don't want to be distasteful here or anything, I like to keep things classy and I think you get the gist of it so let's leave it at that. In any case, that corpse fucker left the premises long ago, so those days of giving the stiffs the stiffy, porking the cadavers, filling the dead with life if we want to get poetic - it's all in the past; I'm sure none of that will ever come up again or have any bearing on the story.

 Less morbid, but also kind of fucked up: part of Martin's duty is to do hourly rounds, and the way it works is pretty ingenious - there are a series of keys hanging off chains strewn around the building which Martin needs to turn in a sort of clock-like device on his fanny pack to prove that he's been to each stop on his patrol. The kicker is that some sadistic soul placed one of the keys on the far end of the morgue hall, forcing the poor nightwatchman to traipse among all the corpses to punch in, as it were. Managers, am I right?

 Writer/director Ole Bornedal has a lot of fun putting spooking Martin at work, but that's a minor part of the story. Prostitute are being murdered around the city, a thread which will inevitably intersect with the morgue storyline but for a while the mystery and thriller elements take a back seat to Martin's relationship with his best friend Jens (Kim Bodnia), an unlikeable, full-fledged self-destructive asshole who does what he can to sabotage everyone around him. Martin is fascinated by Jens's not giving a single fuck about anything, and it drives him to be a shittier person - a toxic dynamic that's sadly believable in someone of that age.

 It's Jens that introduces Martin to Joyce (Rikke Louise Andersson), a teenaged prostitute, and manipulates him to have a dinner date with her. Said date hosts the film's most uncomfortable moment, a cruel scene where Jens psychologically tortures the poor girl, and one that gives the film a nasty misogynistic edge. Not the least because she'll soon be dead, a sacrificial offering to the gods of plot and character development. Sorry, lady, you're just a plot point, turns out we weren't supposed to give a shit about you.

 The mystery itself is fun, but very simple - the elements to solve it are all available from very early on except for the killer's identity, which narrative economy demands be one of the few established characters. The resolution is a bit drawn out, but it's an effectively tense showdown that makes good use of Martin's workplace location-wise, even if it doesn't capitalize on all the elements that had been carefully established earlier. Why doesn't anyone get thrown into the vat of severed feet or whatever that was?

 The acting is pretty good, especially Martin's girlfriend (Sofie Gråbøl) and the detective trying to crack the case (Ulf Pilgaard). Above all he film has an excellent, creepy atmosphere - which I guess is not that hard to do on a mortuary, but cinematographer Dan Laustsen makes it look great. The script has its problems - including severely miscalculating our investment in Jens's rehabilitation and our sympathy for his and the protagonist's escapades - but it's off-beat enough to hold a few surprises, and is never less than engaging. And I love some of its stylistic touches, like a bottle of red, red wine spilling its contents as someone discusses the prostitute murders off-screen. Cheesy, but very effective.

 It won't blow anyone away, but it's an entertaining, slickly executed genre exercise with more than enough personality to be memorable. That its two main characters are so unlikeable is pretty unique, too, though I wouldn't necessarily list that as a asset.
 The same director would remake it a couple years later with a script written by Steven Soderbergh. And now there's a legacy sequel, too, which I'll get to in due time, since I did like this one.