Director/Screenplay – Ole Bornedal, Producer – Thomas Heinesen, Photography – Lasse Frank, Music – Ceiri Torjussen, Visual Effects Supervisor – Martin Madsen, Visual Effects – Nordisk Film Shortcut, Special Effects – Spectre Effects ApS (Supervisor – Christian Schandorph), Makeup Effects – Thomas Foldberg, Production Design – Thomas Greve. Production Company – Nordisk Film Production/Det Dansk Filminstitut/Den Vestdanske Filmpulje/Nordisk Film & TV Fond/Nadcon/ZDF/DR.
Ever since the suicide of his wife Kalinka, Martin Bork has fallen into a slump, still haunted by the actions of the serial killer Peter Wörmer. Their daughter Emma tries to rouse him out of this. Emma now enters med school. To make ends meet, she takes a job at the old morgue that Martin used to attend, much to his horror. A killer begins striking around the city, targeting Martin’s old associates from the morgue. Emma sneaks in to visit Peter Wörmer, now old and blind, in order to prove to her father that he should no longer be scared of him. However, this seems to bring the killer’s focus in on her.
Nightwatch (1994), a darkly funny thriller set around a morgue attendant’s paranoid fears, was a festival hit around the world. It launched the name of director Ole Bornedal and in particular stars Nikolaj Coster-Waldau and Kim Bodnia, both of whom have gone on to successful careers in English-language and Hollywood work. Bornedal was brought to the US by Steven Soderbergh to conduct a remake with the also worthwhile Nightwatch (1998). Now, 29 years after the original Nightwatch came out, Ole Bornedal and most of the principals reunite for a sequel with Demons Are Forever. The major absentee among the cast is Sofie Gråbøl whose character is written out as having committed suicide.
Plotwise, Demons Are Forever is fairly much the same mix as before. A young med student (in this case the daughter of Martin, the protagonist from the original) takes a job working night shift at a morgue, while a serial killer is plaguing the area. There is some difference in that not as much time is spent at the key setting of the morgue – the asylum where Wörmer is imprisoned is far more of a significant locale. This means there is not as much of this film that plays on the central character’s fears and paranoia as they start working the nightshift and none of the scenes where the killer starts playing games with them.
Unlike most sequels, this does show people affected by the events of its predecessor. Demons Are Forever becomes a generational work where we see Nikolaj Coster-Waldau’s Martin depressed and having lost direction in life even as his well-meaning daughter urges him to keep going and find ways to move beyond the events of the past. At contrast to this, we see Wörmer helpless and blind but that he too has a daughter who has taken to killing in vengeance for her father. A lot of the film – far more than the average sequel – is about ghosts of the past. Both daughters and relationships to their fathers are seen as parallels in many ways – one seeking vengeance, one to lift their parent up beyond what happened in the past. And perhaps in some real world parallel, Martin’s daughter who spends all the time trying to inspire her father out of his slump, is played by Ole Bernedal’s own daughter Fanny Leander Bornedal.
Returning after 29 years – Jens (Kim Bodnia) (l) and Martin (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) (r) with Martin’s daughter Emma (Fanny Leander Bornedal) (c)
Because Demons Are Forever abandons the morgue setting for the most part, there is not the sustained mood of dread and paranoid fear of the original. There are some compensations. One of these is the scene that involves the killing of a character during a walk by in the street, which comes with such astonishingly casual effect it makes you jump in your seat. There is some creepy effect to the scene where Fanny Leander Bornedal ventures inside the blind Ulf Pilgaard’s unlit room and, as she turns, we see the shadow of his figure getting up in the background.
The sequel does pick up towards the end where there is some twisting and uncertainty around who the killer is. Bornedal develops good tension out of people running around the asylum being pursued by the killer and with Nikolaj Coster-Waldau trapped in Ulf Pilgaard’s room, tied up as the infirm Ulf stumbles about trying to find him. Despite some of the improbabilities that dogged the first film – PLOT SPOILERS – ie. the killer’s daughter working as his very psychiatrist with nobody having unnoticed – this does generate some okay tension.
Elsewhere Ole Bornedal has directed the tv-made horror film Deep Water (1999); the critically divided period drama I Am Dina (2002); The Substitute (2007) about an alien schoolteacher; the identity mix-up thriller Just Another Love Story (2007); the black comedy Small Time Killers (2017); and a dull venture to the US mainstream with The Possession (2012), although he did return to form with the savage Backwoods Brutality film Deliver Us From Evil (2009).
