Sleepwalker (2017)

October 31, 2024 4:23 PM

After waking up one night to find herself sleepwalking in her nightgown miles from her apartment, a young, widowed graduate student (Ahna O'Reilly) seeks help from a university sleep research facility for her sleepwalking and terrifying nightmares, but soon finds that she does not know if she can trust either those around her or her own perception of reality.

Sleepwalker is a 2017 psychological mystery film directed by Elliott Lester, and starring Ahna O'Reilly as Sarah Foster/Anna Wells. The rest of the cast includes Richard Armitage, Izabella Scorupco, Rachel Melvin, Kevin Zegers, Haley Joel Osment, Matthew Del Negro, and Emma Fitzpatrick. It was filmed in Los Angeles in 2014.

The Hollywood Reporter said of it, "the willfully vague plot gradually unravels as inexorably as the protagonist’s perception of reality."

posted by orange swan (1 comment total)

I thought this was actually quite good, very well-written and creative, with a fine performance from Ahna O'Reilly in the lead role, but it's one of those movies that never found an audience or attracted any attention. It is quite a unique movie, beautifully shot in its low-key, muted way, and with a meditative pace and complex chain of events. Probably every person who sees it might have a different conception of what's happening in it and what it's about, and perhaps it was considered too artsy and indie to have mass appeal.

This movie recreates the experience of a dream better than I've ever seen it done onscreen, with its shifting narratives and logic, its random, senseless oddities and recurring themes, and its frustrations, anxieties, and terrors. O'Reilly's wardrobe, for instance, plays a role in indicating that what we see is not reality. That nightgown of hers is a, er, "special occasion nightgown", as it is sheer, and yet she wears it not only around her female roommate but also to the sleep clinic as no woman would actually do in real life. And her daytime clothes are so weird. When she wears Scott's clothes, they fit her far better than they would actually do given the size discrepancy between them. Her apartment decor feels very sketched in -- it's practically bare. We also don't get a sense of Sarah having a full life. She doesn't seem to have any family, any friends other than her roommate, or do anything other than attend grad school. There's also the way Dr. White gets personally involved with her in a way no ethical medical professional would ever do.

Anyway, this is a worthwhile movie and I recommend it to anyone who stumbles across this post.
posted by orange swan at 6:13 PM on November 18