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21st May 2024
12:59pm BST
For those who love dark and twisty murder mystery thrillers, a great movie in the sub-genre has just been made available to watch at home.
That film is Nightwatch, a 1994 Danish flick now streaming on Shudder with a great cast including Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Game of Thrones, Shot Caller), Sofie Gråbøl (The Killing, Fortitude) and Kim Bodnia (Killing Eve, Pusher)
It centres around Martin (Coster-Waldau), a disaffected law student in Copenhagen who gets a job working as a night watchman at a morgue.
Thinking it will be an easy gig - where he can get paid to study while on shift - the position proves harder than he thought, as he becomes spooked by being in the same place alone where dead bodies are kept.
As all this is happening, Martin and his best friend Jens (Bodnia) start daring each other to commit more and more outlandish actions, as a way of rebelling against their surroundings.
When a serial killer starts targeting sex workers in the Danish capital, however, Martin gets pulled into the mystery of who the culprit is - eventually becoming a prime suspect for the murders due to one of Jens' dares.
Also starring Gråbøl as Martin's kind actress girlfriend Kalinka - Nightwatch's great performances, its creepy mortuary setting, its complex characters and its genuinely twisty and surprising plot led to it becoming a big success in its home country.
It was so acclaimed, in fact, that it inspired an American remake in 1997, starring Ewan McGregor, Patricia Arquette, Josh Brolin and Nick Nolte, as well as a Danish follow-up which came out in 2023 titled Nightwatch: Demons Are Forever.
The legacy sequel sees Coster-Waldau and Bodnia reprising their roles and to mark its release, horror streaming service Shudder have gone ahead and added both the 1994 flick and the follow-up to its library in Ireland, the UK and the US.
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