Ewan McGregor plays a law student who takes a job as a night watchman at a morgue. He begins to discover clues that implicate him as the suspect of a serial of murders.

Ole Bornedal's thriller about a young law student who takes a job as a night watchman in a creepy morgue is long on style but comes up a little short on quality of storytelling. Bornedal sets things up in high style as Martin Bells (Ewan McGregor doing an American accent) makes his rounds in the middle of the night, with only corpses and his own paranoia for company. When bodies start coming in, the prostitute victims of a grisly serial killer, the imposing detective on the case (a hulking Nick Nolte) begins to suspect that Bells is the killer, as all clues start pointing to him. Coscripted by Steven Soderbergh (Out of Sight) and adapted from Bornedal's 1994 Danish thriller, Nightwatch forsakes out-and-out thrills for a more moody approach with flickering lights, menacing shadows and echoing footsteps down long hallways. If only there was a little more energy before the highly effective denouement, which does get scares, even after the killer is revealed. Still, McGregor is supported by a stronger than average cast: in addition to Nolte, Josh Brolin does an amusing turn as McGregor's out-of-control best friend, Patricia Arquette fares well in the standard girlfriend role and the always creepy Brad Dourif makes the most of a sinister and funny bit part as the on-call doctor. You won't jump out of your seat but by the end of Nightwatch you will find yourself remarkably tense. --Mark Englehart

Horror films often bring out the best in a director's style but not in his intelligence. ``Nightwatch'' is an example. It's a visually effective and often scary film to watch, but the story is so leaky that we finally just give up: Scene after scene exists only to toy with us and prop up the impossible plot. Ewan McGregor, from ``Trainspotting,'' stars as Martin Bells, a law student who takes a night watchman's job in the local morgue. It's a creepy building, not improved by two giant pine trees which flank the doors and have been wrapped in plastic, so that they look like swaying bodies in giant garbage bags. Inside, we find the usual lighting problem: Corridors have small bulbs and are spooky, but the cold room for the corpses is brightly lit, so that we can see what we don't much want to see. The building itself has a certain eerie charm, with its large empty spaces and its institutional chill. There's a nice sequence with Lonny Chapman as the retiring watchman, who shows the kid the ropes, filling him in on creepy old stories, and entreating, ``Get a radio!'' Much is made of the alarm that will go off if one of the corpses should suddenly come to life (``It's not going to happen,'' the old man assures Martin). The story is repeated about a watchman from ``several years ago,'' who was dismissed in a messy scandal. There are murky shots of vats of chemicals, one of which, Martin is disturbed to discover, contains ``feet--nothing but feet!'' Of course the watchman's rounds include a time clock on the far wall of the cold room, which must be punched once an hour. (The morgue door has no handle on the inside, which, if you really think about it makes sense, from the point of view of the corpses.) Each marble pallet has a cord above it, within reach of a body that returns to life, although in the absolute dark of the storage room it would be a clever resurrectee who thought to wave his hand in search of it. The other characters: Martin's best friend James (Josh Brolin), who gets in bar fights because he likes the rush (``my tolerance level has increased''). Martin's girlfriend Katherine (Patricia Arquette), who puts up with his bad breath, a byproduct of working around formaldehyde. The creepy doctor (Brad Dourif) who works in the morgue. The frightened hooker (Alix Koromzay) who has a client who wants her to play dead. And the cop, Inspector Cray (Nick Nolte), who is sad, rumpled and wise, and warns Martin that he is being framed for murder: ``There's someone really dangerous standing right behind you.'' One of these people is responsible for a series of murders of prostitutes. I was able to guess which one in the opening credits, although I wasn't sure I was right for a while--and the movie gives him (or her) away in such a sneaky way that for a moment there even seems to be another explanation for his (or her) presence at the murder scene. The movie is a remake of ``Nattevagten,'' a Danish film by Ole Bornedal, who also directed this English-language version. Dimension Films bought the original film, a hit in Europe, and kept it off the market here while producing the retread, no doubt to forestall the kinds of unfavorable comparisons that came up when the Danish director George Sluizer remade his brilliant ``The Vanishing'' (1988) into a sloppy, spineless 1993 American film. I haven't seen `Nattevagten'' and don't know how it compares with ``Nightwatch,'' but this film depends so heavily on horror effects, blind alleys, false leads and red herrings that eventually watching it stops being an experience and becomes an exercise. --ROGER EBERT

If you didn't get enough swollen-corpse depravity out of David Fincher's 1995 serial-killer thriller "Seven," Dutch director Ole Bornedal's "Nightwatch" may fill your tank. "Nightwatch," adapted by Bornedal and Steven Soderbergh from Bornedal's Dutch-language film "Nattevagten," is an empty exercise in the macabre. Like "Seven," it mixes the styles of suspense, horror and film noir, using murky lighting, odd angles and deliberately paced camera movements to create an atmosphere of constant dread. What it lacks is purpose, psychological heft and a killer with his own sense of style. I wasn't a fan of "Seven," but at least its villain was on a mission--to punish violators of the Seven Deadly Sins--that would be personally threatening to most members of the audience. The psycho in "Nightwatch" is a necrophiliac, the scourge of the county morgue, with the peculiar habit of killing and mutilating prostitutes before having sex with them. Most of "Nightwatch" is set in that morgue, where law student Martin Bells ("Trainspotting's" Ewan McGregor) is the newly hired security guard. Graveyard shift. There are rooms where body parts are stored in jars or in vats of formaldehyde, and there's the refrigerated section where the newly dead await autopsies. And to warm him up for the job, the departing night watchman explains what to do in the event a corpse comes to life. As if the job weren't stressful enough, Martin's kinky, thrill-seeking friend James (Josh Brolin) keeps sneaking into the morgue to scare him. He's under the supervision of a petulant, drug-addled duty doctor (the ever-creepy Brad Dourif) who's constantly threatening to have him fired. Bodies start getting moved around during his shift. And a smarmy detective (a slumming Nick Nolte) is asking him for a semen sample to test against evidence left at a murder scene. Worst of all, the rotting breath Martin acquires from all that death-tainted air at work is a net loss in his love life with his live-in girlfriend, Katherine (Patricia Arquette). A smart law student would consider quitting this job, but Martin presses on, doing his rounds with the look and nerves of a cornered rabbit, while evidence mounts that the serial killer is out to frame him for all the murders. One of the future victims has even been calling his home and telling Katherine what a pervert he is. Bornedal keeps the real killer's identity secret through the first half of the film, by showing him only from the waist down, and by making everybody else so weird that they're all suspects. "Nightwatch" is a seriously overcast B-movie with rote performances from everyone but Brolin, who gives James an edge of danger that says that if he isn't a killer, he will be. --JACK MATHEWS