GLOBAL GENRES—In the Light of Guilt: Transnational Noir and Moral Ambiguity in Erik Skjoldbjærg’s Insomnia
/This contribution is part of a series of posts on genre and the ‘global shuffle’.
Erik Skjoldbjærg’s Insomnia (1997) illustrates how cinematic genres migrate across borders, reworking familiar visual styles and ethical frameworks within new cultural and industrial environments. Set amid the perpetual daylight of northern Norway, the film follows a detective whose case becomes a descent into guilt and erasure, turning noir’s visual obscurity into psychological exposure. Although rooted in the crime thriller, Insomnia reshapes noir’s aesthetic and ethical vocabulary through a distinctly Nordic sensibility marked by rationalism, solitude, and moral reflection. Since the 1940s, scholars have defined film noir not as a stable genre but as a cinematic mode shaped by alienation, ambiguity, and visual tension (Schrader, 1972; Borde & Chaumeton, 1955). When these traits move across borders, they acquire new meanings through adaptation and convergence that reflect shifting industrial and cultural contexts (Altman, 1999; Jenkins, 2006). Insomnia exemplifies this process by translating noir’s darkness into relentless light, revealing how transnational cinema transforms inherited moral and visual codes to explore regionally specific anxieties about guilt and perception.
Placing this transformation within the broader framework of contemporary European and world cinema clarifies how such cross-cultural translations of noir occur. Thomas Elsaesser (2005) notes that European cinema has evolved from auteur-centered national traditions into a fluid, transnational field situated between the decline of “national cinema” and the rise of “world cinema.” Rather than a binary opposition between Europe and Hollywood, today’s European production is defined by public subsidy systems, state broadcasters, renewed interest in genre filmmaking, and the normalization of EU-funded co-productions since the 1990s. These industrial and cultural shifts produce hybrid forms that circulate internationally while preserving local inflections, as filmmakers balance art-cinema prestige with the accessibility of genre. Viewed through this lens, Insomnia and Holy Spider (2022) embody noir’s circulation within this European and global ecology: Skjoldbjærg reimagines noir’s moral ambiguity through the psychological realism of Scandinavian state-supported cinema, while Abbasi employs its shadows within a transnational framework to navigate censorship and critique patriarchal power. Both films thus reflect Elsaesser’s dynamics, in which genre functions as a flexible interface between national industries and global audiences, articulating culturally specific versions of shared moral concerns.
This transnational approach aligns with Altman’s (1999) view of genre as a dynamic system shaped by ongoing interaction among textual, industrial, and cultural forces. He identifies three interrelated dimensions of film text, industry, and national culture through which genre operates as a process of negotiation, continually redefining meaning in response to changing creative and institutional contexts. From this perspective, film noir cannot be restricted to the stylistic codes of postwar Hollywood; its continual reinvention across time and geography demonstrates how genres evolve through processes of cultural translation. Jenkins (2006) extends this logic by describing convergence as the movement of stories and aesthetics across media, industries, and cultures, generating hybrid forms that reflect their environments. Together, Altman and Jenkins position genre as a transnational system of circulation where meaning is reconstituted rather than merely transferred. Within this framework, noir appears not as a fixed American tradition but as a mobile discourse that transforms when its visual and moral language interacts with new cultural and industrial conditions. Insomnia exemplifies this transformation by adapting noir’s ethical and visual codes to Scandinavian realism, translating darkness into illumination and ambiguity into introspective guilt that reflects regional psychology and values. Viewed through Altman (1999) and Jenkins (2006), the film becomes evidence of how transnational cinema reshapes inherited forms to articulate evolving global anxieties about morality, perception, and identity.
Schrader (2009) defines film noir not as a genre with fixed conventions but as a cinematic mode distinguished by alienation, moral disillusionment, and ambiguity. He argues that noir’s distinctive tone emerged from postwar disillusionment, translating the era’s moral uncertainty into narratives where characters confront guilt and fatalism within what he calls “a mood of cynicism, pessimism, and darkness” (Film Genre Reader IV, p. 265). Borde and Chaumeton (2002) describe noir as a stylized cinematic world governed by fatalism and moral instability, where anxiety and existential despair replace the moral order of classical Hollywood. Place and Peterson (1974) emphasize that noir’s psychological and ethical instability is expressed primarily through visual form rather than narrative, as low-key lighting, obstructed compositions, and reflective surfaces create an atmosphere of confinement and fracture. This focus on visualizing moral instability suggests that noir’s strength lies in its aesthetic language, which enables its imagery and tone to migrate across cultures and acquire new meanings. Together, these perspectives demonstrate that genre should be understood not as a fixed category but as a fluid cultural process, where style and tone adapt to different contexts while preserving a shared sense of tension and uncertainty. Desser (2009) extends this argument, showing that global noir evolves through transnational exchange as filmmakers recontextualize familiar aesthetic codes to reflect distinct historical and cultural anxieties.
Classic film noir emerged in mid-twentieth-century American cinema as a mode defined by moral ambiguity, psychological unease, and a visual aesthetic that mirrors the instability of its world. Borde and Chaumeton (2002) describe noir as a cinematic universe shaped by uncertainty and fatalism, where the collapse of moral order becomes both a narrative condition and a way of seeing. In this sense, noir transforms ethical confusion into a visual and emotional experience. Its darkness operates as a language of uncertainty, suggesting that perception itself is clouded by guilt, desire, and self-deception. Through this aesthetic language, noir’s moral and visual codes become transferable across cultures, allowing filmmakers to reinterpret its imagery to express their own historical and psychological concerns.
insomnia 1997
In Scandinavian cinema, noir’s visual darkness and moral ambiguity are reinterpreted through landscapes shaped by isolation, rationalism, and introspection, giving rise to what scholars call “Nordic noir.” Norðfjörð (2010) notes that this form preserves the alienation of classic noir but relocates it to bleak, open settings where the environment reflects the characters’ inner turmoil. In Insomnia, the perpetual daylight of northern Norway turns noir’s traditional darkness into exposure, making guilt and moral collapse visible rather than hidden. By reimagining noir’s aesthetic and emotional language within a Nordic context, Insomnia shows that transnational cinema does not simply adopt established conventions but reshapes them to express local moral and psychological tensions. Skjoldbjærg’s film demonstrates that noir’s durability depends on its ability to adapt across cultures, transforming its themes of alienation and guilt through new visual vocabularies that reflect regional conditions.
Skjoldbjærg visualizes noir’s moral instability by inverting its conventional aesthetics, employing blinding daylight, reflective surfaces, and spatial confinement to externalize the protagonist’s psychological collapse. In the pivotal fog sequence, when Jonas Engström mistakenly shoots his partner, the lack of visual clarity becomes a metaphor for moral blindness, echoing Place and Peterson’s view that noir transforms lighting and framing into expressions of ethical uncertainty. As the fog thickens and the visual field disintegrates, Skjoldbjærg converts environmental disorientation into an ethical condition, using obscured sightlines, diffused light, and muffled sound to translate Engström’s confusion into a sensory metaphor for guilt and self-deception. The director thus extends noir’s tradition of visualizing internal fracture through obstructive composition, treating the fog not as atmosphere but as an active agent that fractures space and erases the boundary between victim and perpetrator. Across the film, noir’s darkness becomes a suffocating brightness, as perpetual daylight functions less as illumination than as exposure, forcing guilt into visibility and denying any refuge in shadow. This inversion supports Norðfjörð’s (2010) claim that Nordic noir reconfigures instability and alienation within cold, desolate environments where natural light magnifies psychological tension rather than easing it. In Insomnia, visibility itself becomes punishment; the absence of night mirrors Engström’s inability to escape his conscience, turning the landscape into an instrument of judgment. Through this transformation, Skjoldbjærg shows how regional environments can redefine noir’s aesthetic language, translating its universal preoccupation with guilt, perception, and moral decay into a distinctly Scandinavian meditation on exposure and isolation.
This same sequence also highlights how cultural and industrial conditions reshape noir’s moral framework when adapted across contexts. While Skjoldbjærg’s fog sequence portrays the shooting as a moment of confusion and panic that merges perception and guilt, Nolan’s version reframes the same event within a context of professional tension and moral compromise. In the Norwegian film, Engström’s disoriented vision causes him to fire blindly, turning the environment into an externalization of his inner collapse. Nolan relocates this scene to a world defined by institutional pressure and reputation, where Detective Dormer is under investigation for past misconduct and faces betrayal from his partner. When Dormer fires in the fog and kills Eckhart, the question of whether it was accidental or intentional lingers, shaping the film’s moral tone. His later uncertainty reflects noir’s concern with self-deception, yet the American version grounds that unease in systemic corruption rather than existential guilt. This distinction illustrates Altman’s (1999) idea that genre evolves through negotiation between industrial and cultural forces. Skjoldbjærg’s version treats the fog as a psychological metaphor for moral blindness, while Nolan’s turns it into a visual expression of ethical avoidance within a bureaucratic system. The comparison reveals how transnational adaptation transforms noir’s shared themes of guilt and perception to reflect differing cultural beliefs about responsibility and redemption.
holy spider (2022)
A parallel process of cultural translation unfolds in Ali Abbasi’s Holy Spider (2022), which adapts noir’s fascination with guilt, corruption, and decay to the Iranian social and religious context. Whereas Skjoldbjærg renders guilt visible through relentless daylight, Abbasi restores noir’s darkness and shadow but uses them to expose how moral rot thrives beneath the surface of patriarchal piety. His night sequences, illuminated by dim streetlights, television glare, and uneven pools of artificial light, transform noir’s chiaroscuro into a visual discourse on surveillance, control, and complicity. Darkness becomes a language of both concealment and revelation, reflecting a society where violence is simultaneously condemned and sanctioned. In this way, Holy Spider converts noir’s visual lexicon into a critique of institutional power, replacing the solitary crisis of conscience typical of classic noir with a collective blindness maintained by religious and political authority. Read alongside Insomnia, the film exemplifies what Altman (1999) and Jenkins (2006) describe as the transnational life of genre, in which shared stylistic codes move across borders and acquire new moral significance within distinct cultural frameworks. Holy Spider thus extends noir’s global evolution by reinterpreting its moral language through an Iranian lens, using shadow not only as concealment but as complicity, and exposing how genre conventions adapt to local histories of repression and control. Both Abbasi and Skjoldbjærg reveal that noir’s endurance depends on this capacity for absorption and reinvention, transforming an American cinematic mode into a global vocabulary for depicting psychological and ethical anxiety.
This process of circulation and reinvention extends beyond Europe and the Middle East, reaching back to Hollywood through Christopher Nolan’s 2002 remake of Insomnia. Nolan’s version reabsorbs Skjoldbjærg’s Nordic reinterpretation into an American industrial and narrative framework, illustrating how transnational exchange can culminate in cultural re-domestication. Set under the perpetual daylight of Alaska, the film preserves the original’s premise of a detective haunted by guilt yet reconfigures its moral texture. Where Skjoldbjærg’s Insomnia sustains ambiguity and paralysis, Nolan’s adaptation reshapes guilt into a path toward resolution, translating existential unease into a quest for ethical clarity. Al Pacino’s portrayal of Detective Dormer reflects this transformation: his exhaustion and guilt resolve through confession and self-sacrifice, reaffirming a redemptive morality absent from the Norwegian version. Visually, Nolan tempers the alienation of Skjoldbjærg’s film through a warmer palette and controlled compositions, replacing psychological disorientation with narrative coherence. The result demonstrates Hollywood’s tendency to absorb foreign aesthetic experimentation into familiar genre conventions, neutralizing moral ambiguity through closure. In this way, the remake completes noir’s circular migration from Hollywood to Scandinavia and ultimately back to its American context, showing how industrial conditions determine whether ambiguity is sustained, reframed, or resolved.
In Holy Spider, Abbasi reconfigures noir’s visual vocabulary to critique the intersection of faith, gender, and violence in contemporary Iran. In a key scene, Saeed watches his own murders replayed on television, his face lit by the cold blue glow of the screen. This image collapses the distance between spectator and subject, transforming the act of viewing into complicity and turning self-reflection into public spectacle. The screen replaces the mirror of classical noir, situating Abbasi’s imagery within a culture governed by surveillance, mediation, and moral performance. Rather than exposing guilt, visibility sanctifies violence by portraying Saeed as a religious martyr. The televised light functions as both halo and indictment, revealing how institutional authority transforms moral corruption into collective affirmation. Jenkins (2006) observes that convergence allows media forms to circulate and adapt across social and technological contexts; Abbasi’s film enacts this process by merging noir’s play of light and reflection with Iranian sociopolitical critique. Where Insomnialinks visibility with conscience, Holy Spider ties it to power and control. Together, the films demonstrate how transnational noir translates shared moral and psychological tensions into culturally specific visual systems that reflect distinct modes of seeing and believing.
Both Insomnia and Holy Spider operate within the framework of the crime drama, employing investigation and pursuit as narrative structures through which moral and psychological questions emerge. Yet neither film resolves its central crime by restoring order; instead, each reorients the procedural form toward ethical inquiry. In Insomnia, the detective’s guilt eclipses justice as the dominant concern, while in Holy Spider, the investigation exposes institutional complicity rather than isolating individual wrongdoing. Through this fusion of noir and crime drama, both directors convert investigation into a meditation on conscience, surveillance, and power. Considered together, the films illustrate how hybrid genre design enables filmmakers to balance global accessibility with local specificity, reshaping familiar narrative frameworks to express culturally grounded moral and emotional tensions. In each case, noir’s aesthetics intertwine with the conventions of the crime narrative to transform investigation into a form of moral excavation, demonstrating how transnational cinema employs genre hybridity to interrogate both personal and systemic corruption.
The comparative movement between Insomnia and Holy Spider reveals noir not as a static American inheritance but as an evolving cinematic discourse shaped by cultural translation. Both films demonstrate how genre conventions adapt as they cross borders, transforming visual and moral codes to articulate localized forms of anxiety, guilt, and corruption. A closer look at the shared fog sequence in Skjoldbjærg’s and Nolan’s versions of Insomnia underscores this process at the level of cinematic detail, showing how the same narrative moment acquires distinct moral and emotional meanings through its cultural and industrial contexts. In doing so, they reaffirm Altman’s view of genre as a dynamic negotiation between text, industry, and culture, while extending Jenkins’s notion of convergence to the realm of global aesthetics. Noir’s persistence in these contexts underscores that its power lies not in fixed iconography but in its flexibility as a moral and psychological language. Through their distinct manipulations of light and darkness, Insomnia and Holy Spider, along with the circulation between Skjoldbjærg’s original and Nolan’s remake, reveal how transnational cinema uses genre hybridity to explore universal ethical tensions within culturally specific frameworks. In this way, noir’s global evolution underscores its dual role as both a shared cinematic idiom of ethical reflection and a mirror through which diverse societies confront their cultural and moral complexities.
References
Altman, R. (1999). Film/Genre. British Film Institute.
Borde, R., & Chaumeton, É. (2002). A Panorama of American Film Noir: 1941–1953 (P. Hammond, Trans.). City Lights Books. (Original work published 1955)
Desser, D. (2009). Global noir: Genre film in the age of transnationalism. In B. K. Grant (Ed.), Film genre reader IV (pp. 628–648). University of Texas Press.
Elsaesser, T. (2005). European cinema: Face to face with Hollywood. Amsterdam University Press.
Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence culture: Where old and new media collide. New York University Press.
Norðfjörð, B. Æ. (2015). Crime up north: The case of Norway, Finland and Iceland. In T. Gustafsson & P. Kääpä (Eds.), Nordic genre film: Small nation film cultures in the global marketplace (pp. 145–163). Edinburgh University Press.
Place, J. A., & Peterson, L. S. (1974). Some visual motifs of film noir. Film Comment, 10(1), 30–35.
Schrader, P. (2009). Notes on film noir. In B. K. Grant (Ed.), Film genre reader IV (pp. 265–278). University of Texas Press. (Original work published 1972)
Films Cited
Insomnia [Film]. (1997). E. Skjoldbjærg (Director). Norsk Film A/S.
Insomnia [Film]. (2002). C. Nolan (Director). Alcon Entertainment; Section Eight; Hilary Seitz Productions; Warner Bros. Pictures.
Holy Spider [Film]. (2022). A. Abbasi (Director). Profile Pictures; Film i Väst.
Biography
Lauren Reel is a graduate student in Communication Management at the University of Southern California, where she focuses on marketing, strategic communication, and storytelling across global media industries. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in Cinema and Television Arts from California State University, Northridge, graduating summa cum laude. Alongside her professional work in marketing and brand strategy, Reel studies global cinema with a particular interest in Latin American and transnational film. Her academic research examines how genre, memory, and cultural identity circulate across national contexts, reflecting her broader interest in the intersection of global film industries, communication, and narrative.