A fairly conventional but slickly made thriller that can’t help but eventually succumb to the over-the-top absurdity it so threatens to embrace throughout its first two acts, Nightwatch stars Ewan McGregor (not quite yet the superstar in 1997) as a law school student who takes a position as a nightwatchman at a morgue, thinking that it’ll be the most non-eventful job in the world and will allow him a quiet place to learn lawyer stuff; studying ends up being put on the backburner when the mutilated victims of a serial killer start piling up — and the new nightwatchman ends up being the prime suspect. An argument for why students should never have to hold down jobs if there ever was one, Nightwatch is an entertaining genre flick that doesn’t seem to mind that it just gets sillier as it goes along, though the cast — including Nick Nolte as a Nick Nolte-ish detective, Patricia Arquette as McGregor’s would-be love interest and Brad Dourif as a creepy doctor — keeps it on track with some go-for-broke performances; director Ole Bornedal also directed the 1994 Swedish film on which this is based, with Steven Soderbergh earning a quick paycheck for the screenplay. You also get an uncredited cameo by John C. Reilly as a cop and Josh Brolin makes one of his ’90s “Hey, is that Brand from The Goonies?” appearances.
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New On Netflix: Nightwatch