Airing this evening (Friday 26 April) at 9.11pm on Iris, Insomnia is perhaps one of the lesser known films of Christopher Nolan. The director, who dominated the box office last summer with his Oppenheimer, he became famous with the trilogy dedicated to dark Knight and with Inception, but his other films remained in the background. Insomnia falls into this category, although the feature film presents itself as a tense thriller starring two great masters of cinema such as Al Pacino and Robin Williams.
Insomnia, the plot
Will Dormer (Al Pacino) is a Los Angeles homicide detective with his own ironclad but very precise moral compass. His pursuit of good, in fact, pushes him not to stop in front of any obstacle. And precisely because of this personality the detective is accused of having deliberately falsified evidence in order to frame a pedophile of whose guilt he was certain, so as not to risk seeing the criminal return to freedom. His superiors, however, cannot help but punish him for his actions and for this reason they decide to send him to a remote village in Alaska, where night never falls and every day is marked by sunlight even at midnight . There, Will must investigate a murder that is connected to Walter Finch (Robin Williams), a local writer whose big fan the girl who was found dead was. The young Ellie Burr also investigates the case (Hilary Swank), but the investigations soon take a strange turn. Due to the lack of hours of darkness, Will begins to have disturbed sleep and his rest is also often interrupted by mysterious and disturbing calls.
The disturbing true story of Westley Allan Dodd
Inspired by a Norwegian film of the same title and released in 1997, Insomnia It presents itself to the viewer as a thriller with a canonical structure and which focuses mainly on the resolution of a murder case with a detective who must first of all rediscover himself and his passion for his work. Thanks also to a truly exceptional cast, the feature film directed by Christopher Nolan It’s a film that definitely deserves a watch. In addition to this, however, as can be read on the website of‘Internet Movie Database, the film also hides within its diegesis a reference to a true and terrible news story, which sees the serial killer as the protagonist Westley Allan Dodd. In fact, in a scene of the film, Dormer, the character played by Al Pacino, mentions a murderer named Dobbs: although the name is called, the change is not so profound as to not allow us to recognize in this invented killer a reference to the one who he was a child murderer.
Active especially in the 1980s, Dodd spent much of his life molesting children: in fact, already in his pre-adolescent phase, Dodd began to engage in criminal behavior. At thirteen, as we also read above Unilad, began to sexually expose himself to children in his neighborhood, before molesting his own cousins, and in the following years he often found work in fields that allowed him to have easy access to his young victims, as a humanitarian worker or as a waiter in restaurants frequented by families and very young people. During his life he was stopped and arrested several times, but on each occasion the law had a ”light” attitude towards him: he almost always obtained the minimum sentence, because there was no evidence that he had touched his victims or showed parts of themselves.
The escalation of his depravity, as we also read on The True Crime Database, arrived in the late 1980s, when he killed Cole Neer and his brother William. The children, aged eleven and ten, were approached by the killer in David Douglas Park in Vancouver and taken to a selected area where, according to the reconstruction of the New York Times, Dodd tied them up, molested them and then killed them with a knife after hitting them repeatedly. Dodd’s third murder was that of Lee Iseli, a four-year-old boy who was kidnapped by the killer and taken to his apartment, where he was raped repeatedly before being killed. Throughout the terrible abuse, the killer photographed his depravity. The next morning he killed the child and hung his poor tortured body inside a wardrobe, photographing it.
As we read on New York Daily Newsthe killer kept a diary of his crimes, with photographs, articles and even the idea of a sort of torture machine. In it she began to pour out his perversions but also his plans for other crimes.
However, in September of the same year, after a failed attempt to kidnap another child, the serial killer was finally arrested and, after confessing to his murders, on 14 July 1990 he was sentenced to the death penalty, carried out on 5 January 1993.
