Nightwatch: Demons Are Forever
Written and Directed by Ole Bornedal
Starring Fanny Leander Bornedal, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Alex Høgh Andersen
Runtime: 113 minutes
Streaming on Shudder May 17

by Joe Carlough, Staff Writer

Did you see the original Nightwatch, the one that came out in 1994? If you haven’t, you should probably check it out if you’re interested in this sequel. Nightwatch: Demons Are Forever is a pretty faithful follow-up to the first. Maybe too faithful, as it quickly begins to feel like an adaptation more than a sequel. I found it to be an okay movie but less stark and a lot less clever than the original. At the very least, I hope this film proves a good stepping stone for lead actor Fanny Leander Bornedal who I thought was just great.

To be honest, I had not seen the original Nightwatch but watched it (in the morning; a morningwatch, you could say) immediately before watching this sequel. Had I known what it was about–a young law student takes a job as nightwatch at the city morgue, but soon finds himself caught up as a suspect in a plot by a serial killer who kills, scalps, and sexually desecrates the bodies of his female victims–I definitely would not have watched it. I try not to read about movies I want to see, and when I saw the subtitle of this movie–Demons Are Forever–and that the original came out in 1994, I assumed something along the lines of Demon Wind, Demons, or Night of the Demons was waiting for me. That was my mistake. 

Nightwatch: Demons Are Forever follows the daughter of that original nightwatchman as she, now a student in forensic biology, takes the same job her father once held in order to better understand the great traumas in his life, including the suicide of her mother. The daughter, Emma (played by writer/director Ole Bornedal’s real-life daughter Fanny), soon finds herself caught up in a plot similar to the original: after meeting the murderer from the original movie, he sets his sights on her, um, scalp, and sends a protégé he met at the mental hospital out to get her. The plot plods on from there, mimicking the first, but with some truly nonsensical scenes: in one, the newly-out killer, who was caught after his first murder, escapes his hospital room by rubbing blood all over his face and joining some kind of Friday night Halloween conga line. It’s the sort of thing that could have played better in a movie that didn’t take itself so seriously, but Nightwatch: Demons Are Forever is just not fun enough to be kitschy. 

I think my biggest issue with the film is that I rarely understand why characters are acting the way they are. The first film, while I found it…well, just plain gross, was clever all the way through and really kept me guessing because of how complex the characters were. These characters lack depth and reason, and I found I didn’t recognize any of the characters in today’s world. The dialogue, particularly that of the college friends, is heavily steeped in the whip-crack fast sarcasm and vulgar displays of the 1990s. The dialogue of the female detective is even worse, so unemotional and cruel that she feels like she’s been pulled out of a noir film from the 70s. At one point, she asks the protagonist Emma at one point if she’s crazy, like her dad, and when Emma responds that he’s been having a tough time, the officer says “Is he really? How sad.” Driiiiiippping with sarcasm. Uh, yeah, thirty years ago he and his fiance were bound and gagged by a serial killer who was attempting to frame him for murder and sexually assaulting dead bodies, and, though they managed to escape, his wife eventually committed suicide (no spoilers, we learn this all in the first few minutes of the movie). I think it’s pretty understandable that he’s “having a tough time.” The writing is so peculiar and the style so dated that it feels like the script was written directly after the original and shelved for thirty years before being dusted back off and presented as-is. 

Fans who remember the original Nightwatch fondly and haven’t seen it in some time will most likely find more to enjoy here than I did. With an almost incredible lack of suspense, I found Nightwatch: Demons Are Forever to be a bit of a slog to get through, and the twist ending ultimately left me unimpressed. If you’re into gruesome thrillers, the original film is worth a revival, but, if I were you, I’d leave the sequel locked in the morgue.