NIGHTWATCH: DEMONS ARE FOREVER - Mark Reviews Movies

Nightwatch: Demons Are Forever, Shudder

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 16, 2024

Arriving 30 years after its predecessor was released in both movies' native Denmark, Nightwatch: Demons Are Forever is an odd sequel, which repeats pretty much everything about the first movie except for that one's jarring tonal shifts, and even less successful as a standalone thriller. The original apparently was a considerable hit in Denmark, although it never received any official release in the United States at or around the time. That movie was basically hidden by the studio responsible for a 1997 American remake, and maybe there are a couple of noteworthy signs here. Nobody got around to correcting the oversight of releasing the 1994 movie until now, while the remake has since been forgotten.

That's enough with the trivia, though. Writer/director Ole Bornedal's movie is another of those legacy sequels, which serve as both a reboot of its predecessor and a follow-up to the original story. In this one, Martin (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, whose rise to some fame since the '90s certainly has to be some part of the motive for making such a belated sequel), who found himself at the center of a murder mystery while working as a night watchman at a Copenhagen university's medical department in the first movie, returns.

The main character, however, is his 20-something daughter Emma (Fanny Leander Bornedal, the filmmaker's daughter), a medical student at the same school, who decides to take the same job as her father, despite knowing how he, Emma's mother, and Martin's best friend were terrorized and traumatized by encounters with a serial killer because of the gig. This is one of those cases in which less knowledge of a sequel's predecessor might be a benefit. When the filmmaker last left those now-older—but, surprisingly, not wiser—characters, they were joking and laughing their way through a double-wedding ceremony, so one supposes the trauma of events from the first movie arrived with a bit of a delay.

In other words, the sequel takes itself with dreadful severity, and that might have worked, in spite of the setup's apparent inconsistency with the original movie. The only problem is that the basic premise and all of the gradual revelations here are inherently silly, especially because the whole thing becomes a case of history repeating itself in ways the characters here should definitely realize. Sure, the humor of the predecessor stuck out in awkward and, since the sex-comedy elements were directly juxtaposed with murders that had a sexual motive behind them, troublesome ways, but in that humor, Bornedal at least seemed to acknowledge how fundamentally goofy his thriller was.

Here, all of that is played with a straight face. Hence, when Emma ends up at the center of yet another murder mystery that's directly inspired by the one her father went through, we're just left to wonder why nobody, even characters who are aware of or experienced the first crimes, seems capable of making the screenplay's most obvious connections for themselves.

Martin apparently is too busy wallowing in grief after the suicide of his wife (an off-screen death of a major character that suggests at least one of the actors from the original saw the mistaken judgment and cynicism of this sequel) to figure out that someone is trying to finish the work of the murderer he confronted. The other characters from the first movie are too busy being killed or, in the case of friend Jens (Kim Bodnia), joking about past tragedy and horrors—until the script needs him to have a last-minute flash of sincerity—to discern what's clear, either.

The basic premise has Emma deciding to visit the killer (played by Ulf Pilgaard) from the first movie, hoping to prove to her father that the murderer is no longer worth any fear. The killer, by the way, has made a miraculous recovery from certain death to being in a coma for decades and, over the course of the story, makes an even more extraordinary recovery from being catatonic to inspiring at least two copycat murderers. Whatever the Danish health care system is, the movie makes a case that it should be replicated around the globe.

The rest of the plot is a standard mystery, filled with red herrings, plenty of cheating in terms of how Bornedal keeps the killer's identity a secret, and a climax that puts two characters in potential danger with the final pair of suspects, which really makes it feel as if the filmmaker could have just flipped a coin to determine which of them is the culprit. The whole of Nightwatch: Demons Are Forever is just as haphazard, really, ignoring what came before it in key ways but sticking so close to its predecessor in others that its plot is as transparent as it is redundant.

Note: Shudder, the streaming service on which the sequel will be released, is also making the original Nightwatch available on its platform, marking that movie's first official release in the United States.

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