Insomnia (1997)

The purest dose of Nordic noir mood on film. Stellan Skarsgård plays a detective sent to Tromsø, above the Arctic Circle, to work a murder case under a sun that never sets. When the arrest goes wrong and he shoots his own partner by mistake, he blames the suspect and starts covering his tracks. Erik Skjoldbjærg keeps everything cold and unshowy, and Skarsgård's slow unraveling through sleepless, sunlit nights is more unsettling than any chase. Christopher Nolan remade it in 2002 with Al Pacino, and the remake has its admirers, but the Norwegian original is the morally murkier film and far less willing to let its detective off the hook.