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Christopher Nolan may have won an Oscar for his atomic bomb epic Oppenheimer, but the director’s filmography is loaded with other treasures too.
Titles that spring to mind are likely to include 2014’s space odyssey Interstellar, 2010’s Inception, and, of course, his beloved Batman trilogy starring Christian Bale as the caped crusader.
Long-time fans of Nolan may also throw Memento into the mix, his 2000 psychological thriller in which Guy Pearce plays a man with amnesia hunting for his wife’s killer.
Less spoken about, however, is the 2002 mystery-thriller Insomnia, which is now streaming on BBC iPlayer – giving Brits the perfect opportunity to watch what Nolan called his most “underrated” film.
Starring Al Pacino and Robin Williams, Insomnia is a remake of a 1997 Norwegian neo-noir thriller by Erik Skjoldbjaerg. It is the only one of Nolan’s films where he is not credited as the writer.
The film follows a Los Angeles homicide detective who is investigating the murder of a high school girl in a small Alaskan town when he is drawn into a psychological game of cat-and-mouse by the primary suspect. Hilary Swank, Maura Tierney and Martin Donovan also star.
Insomnia was well received at the time of its release in 2002. In a five-star review for The Guardian, film critic Peter Bradshaw called it a “magnificent blanc-noir” that is “pleasingly old fashioned, yet viscerally and sensually modern, delivering an icy, sub-zero burn to the mind”.
The film currently has a 92 per cent score on review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, with one reviewer calling it Nolan’s “most underrated movie”.
“Insomnia deserves to be put right up there with [the] director’s classic films. It’s even arguably better than some of his later films,” said one fan on IMDb.
The director himself called it “probably the most underrated” of all his films, during an interview for Tom Shone’s 2020 book The Nolan Variations.
“I’m very proud of the film,” he said. “I think, of all my films, it’s probably the most underrated. […] The reality is it’s one of my most personal films in terms of what it was to make it. It was a very vivid time in my life.
“It was my first studio film, I was on location, it was the first time I’d worked with huge movie stars.”
The film is now available to watch on BBC iPlayer, after it was added this week along with another of Nolan’s films: The Prestige (2006).
Up next for Nolan is The Odyssey, his starry adaptation of Homer’s epic poem led by Matt Damon. It is set to be released on 17 July in the UK and the US, made on a reported budget of $250m (£218.6m).
