Saturday 25 May 2024

Shudder Saturday: Nightwatch: Demons Are Forever (2023)

While I didn't expect much from this belated sequel to Nightwatch, I knew that I had to give it a watch. Considering that it managed to get back so many people from the original, both behind and in front of the camera, I suspected that it might at least be decent. This was tempered by the fact that I wasn't the biggest fan of the first film though.

In a major twist, worthy of the films themselves, Nightwatch: Demons Are Forever is actually a better film than the original film. That one may have made a name for writer-director Ole Bornedal, and may have provided a great platform for actors Nikolaj Coster-Waldau and Kim Bodnia, but this feels like a more assured, and arguably slightly darker, wander through the same territory.

Time has passed for everyone. Some have survived, but one or two haven't. Emma (Fanny Leander Bornedal, daughter of the writer-director) misses her deceased mother, and she also sees the constant toll that the weight of past events has on her father, Martin (Coster-Waldau, reprising his role). Emma decides to retrace some footsteps from decades before, taking a night watch job that allows her to get a bit closer to, and to find out a bit more about, the killer who almost destroyed her parents just under three decades ago.

While this is far from perfect, it's a film that absolutely excels in the times it gets everything just right. Bornedal may lead the cast of newer, younger, characters for the majority of the runtime, but there's enough time spent with Coster-Waldau's character, and a returning Kim Bodnia, to allow viewers to see the repercussions of major trauma rippling through the lives, and forever altering, the survivors of a deadly killing spree. I would say that Bornedal just about gets the right balance, providing a film that is part character study and part tense thriller. I would also say that he delivers something more consistent and intense this time around, showing the development of his skillset that has also been on show in a variety of other projects over the years (from the slick horror of The Possession to the dark comedy of Small Town Killers).

Bornedal is pretty good in the lead role, and certainly does well enough to carry the film along on her shoulders while everything is put in place to wind together for a brilliantly entertaining finale. Coster-Waldau and Bodnia are both able to get back inside their characters with ease, the former being much more outwardly changed by the events of the first film, and Ulf Pilgaard also returns for a number of crucial scenes. Paprika Steen and Sonja Richter are very good, Casper Kjær Jensen is entertaining as the potential villain who seems too obvious to be the real villain, and that's about it. There are other people filling out the cast, but they're uninteresting, and all blur into one another, while viewers wait patiently to rejoin the more captivating central characters.

Maybe it's all down to my expectations, considering how many years I spent misremembering Night Watch as a much better movie, but I ended up being really impressed by this. I would (tentatively) recommend it to those who liked the first movie, and I'll be interested to hear back from anyone who enjoyed it as much as I did.

7/10

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