"Insomnia"

Will is embraced, almost literally, by Ellie Burr (Hilary Swank), a puppyish Nightmute cop who has studied his most famous homicide investigations and looks to him as an acolyte looks to a doughnut-fueled guru. Ellie's not in drag or anything, but this is a pretty boy-like role; perhaps after her disastrous performance in "The Affair of the Necklace" Swank is more at peace with the androgyny that seems central to her screen persona. It's interesting, in fact, that there's no sexual or romantic undertone to Ellie's relationship with Will (or for that matter anywhere else in this supremely chaste film).

Speaking of the Nightmute killer, Will tells the worshipful Ellie, "This guy crossed the line and didn't even blink. You don't come back from that." Briefly, in a few early scenes that seem to reveal very little, Nolan and Seitz put everything in "Insomnia" on the table. Will and his partner Hap (Martin Donovan) have been exiled to Alaska while a police corruption scandal, in which both may be implicated, unfolds in California. Ellie will have to decide whether Will is really the man she thinks he is, or is in fact a guy who crossed the line and can't come back. Bedeviled by the sun that never sets and by whatever's buzzing in his head, Will can't sleep.

When Will and Hap pursue the murder suspect onto a rocky, fog-shrouded beach -- once again, a creepy landscape that seems more allegorical than real -- shots are fired and Hap goes down, convinced that Will has shot him deliberately to shut him up. (Hold those cards and letters, people: Nothing that happens in the first 20 minutes and is obvious in the trailer can be considered a spoiler.) Has he? Even Will doesn't know for sure, but just in case, he lies to Hap's wife, lies to Ellie, meddles with the evidence and generally engages in a Nixonian coverup that can only make things worse.

Then Will starts to get sympathetic late-night phone calls from the principal murder suspect, a mild-mannered local mystery writer named Walter Finch (Williams). "Are you seeing things?" Walter asks. "Little trails? Flashes of light?" Walter insists that he and Will aren't so different. He hadn't meant to kill that girl either, honest. It was like Hap's death; it just sort of happened. Considering how similar their situations are, maybe they can work something out. Will blunders through the endless Alaskan daylight like an aging circus bear, and Ellie quotes his own ghostwritten wisdom back at him: "A good cop can't sleep because part of the puzzle is missing. A bad cop can't sleep because his conscience won't let him."

Anything you might want to say about Williams' delicate performance here is true: Playing a psychopath is clearly a smart career move -- in fact, it smacks of career advice from an agent or publicist -- and he has always excelled at characters whose surface is subtly at odds with what's inside them. But the thing about "Insomnia" is that Walter really doesn't matter. When Will tells him, in that trademark Pacino combination of singsong and growl, "You're about as mysterious to me as a blocked toilet is to a fuckin' plumber," he's not kidding.

Walter is a device that forces Will to come to grips with his own guilt and try to expiate it -- in one unforgettable scene, he virtually drowns in it -- to commit his worst crimes and try to forgive himself. And, of course, to travel into the deepest busted-wiper-blade visions of insomniac delusion that Nolan can conjure up. Strictly in terms of plot, "Insomnia" isn't much of a mystery. But like the best thrillers it dives below the ordered surface of the genre into the coldest waters of the individual soul, where Hitchcock and David Lynch and Dostoyevsky have ventured. Does Christopher Nolan belong in that company? Not quite yet, but he's on the way.

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