There's a notable scene in Laputa (Castle in the Sky) when the two main characters are going through a tunnel of lightning in the sky, and everything goes silent. It's amazingly effective. The Disney release put music there.

I didn't know that. I try avoid dubbed versions of anything unless there is some amazingly compelling reason, like a voice actor I adore, and I can't actually think of a case where that happened. Yeesh.

And obscuring with light also strikes me as something you're unlikely to find in American films (though you'd be able to tell me! You've watched many more!)--I feel as if American cinema just can't get beyond the light-truth-revelation trope, whereas you'd think anything done that unrelentingly would just cry out for subversion--even in America.

I'm not quite sure how to answer. I was just trying to remember what new movies I've seen in theaters this year—I've been able to come up with Beasts of the Southern Wild, Moonrise Kingdom, The Avengers, and it's entirely possible that's it. (I really wanted to see The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists, but it's not American and I missed it anyway.) I don't have a high opinion of mainstream American film, but I don't think our national cinema is a lost cause, either. I can remember going to see movies two and three times a month in 2007.

That said: I mentioned a character to selidor, upthread. Her name is Hilde; she is one of Jonas' colleagues in Tromsø, a small, dark-haired woman about ten years his junior with a wry, expressive mouth, not conventionally pretty. She walks with her hands in her pockets, the buckled back of her jacket swinging like a detective's trenchcoat; she leans up in doorways like Jonas' conscience, watching him skeptically and sympathetically, except that her purpose in this film is not to reflect him, but to get on with her work. Going through the dead girl's closet, she holds an expensive little black cocktail dress against herself for a vulnerable, self-mocking moment before she hands it back to Jonas. She's the woman he doesn't hit on. In the remake, her equivalent is played by Hilary Swank: a lanky, wide-eyed small-town rookie who idolizes Dormer, so she gets to be disillusioned by him and then witness him redeem himself, partly by saving her. This last makes it very difficult for me not to write: because there's no point in having a woman in a story if she's not going to be threatened, and need a man to get her out of it, because there is no comparable incident in the original. I can't tell if that's a difference between Norwegian and American movies, or between independent and mainstream, or just the way Erik Skjoldbjærg thinks about women vs. Christopher Nolan. But I know which version I find more interesting. I would have been even more pleased and surprised if I had found it in a film here.

I just wish I lived in a country that admitted ambiguity more easily in its art.

The only times I've hallucinated, it was related to sleep deprivation. Your description of the Skjoldbjaerg film *vividly* recalled those sensations to mind.

You make it sound like a contagious haunting. I'm not sure that's wrong.