Arrow Video: Sleep (2020) - Reviewed

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Courtesy of Arrow Films
German writer-director Michael Venus came out of nowhere in the late 2000s with three short films before making a most confident feature film debut with his 2020 psychological horror thriller Schlaf or Sleep in English.  Co-written by Venus with Thomas Friedrich, the film comes to us from the good folks at Arrow Video who have put together a deluxe limited edition set, a lot for a first-time director no one has heard of before.  The risk is worth taking however as Sleep represents a unique new voice in psychedelic surrealist dream horror which manages to evoke everything from Bunuel to Lynch to Gilliam through the mold of the psychological thriller. 

 
Marlene (Sandra Huller of Toni Erdmann) is a former flight attendant suffering recurring dreams involving a mysterious and secluded hotel she has never been to and proceeds to investigate upon finding out the hotel in fact exists.  Upon arrival she experiences a nervous breakdown and is committed to a psych ward deprived of the means to contact her daughter Mona (Gro Swantje Kohlhof) who herself gets drawn into her mother’s investigation.  Leading her to Stainbach, a utopian village with few residents but many skeletons lurking in the closet, her search leads her toward a missing woman named Trude and an elderly couple managing the hotel grounds who may know more about her disappearance than they’re telling. 
 
Touching on varying sleep states evoking the strange psychosexual and extremely violent vibes of Vanishing Waves (another dream logic driven freak out), Sleep is an interesting and picturesque mystery thriller that starts off slow before kicking the hallucinatory madness into high gear by repeatedly yanking the rug out from under you.  Once you begin to think you have a handle on what Sleep is going, you find yourself slipping and falling with Mona into a bottomless rabbit hole through which there may not be a way out. 

 
One of the film’s virtues is the unreliability of both Marlene and her daughter Mona, leaving ample room for us to buy or disbelieve their visions as truth or simply insanity.  The film has both characters at one point or another do something aggressively out of touch with their personality that feels oddly appropriate in the film’s hazy dream-nightmare logic.  Both actresses Huller and Kohlhof go the full distance for the film’s abrupt tonal and logical shifts with a conviction reminiscent of Naomi Watts’ and Laura Elena Harring’s dualistic turns in Lynch’s Mulholland Drive.  At the end of the day Sleep begins to boil down to a more standardized genre thriller…or does it?
 
Lensed beautifully in lush panoramic widescreen by Marius von Felbert, the netherworld of Sleep is a visually alluring one to fall into even when we’re aware that we’re drowning.  Bathed in lush colors interspersed with key sequences of deep shadows and low light levels, the look of Sleep is integral to the film’s sharp contrasts between hyperkinetic sensory assault and near audiovisual silence.  Sound is equally important to the world of Sleep with muffled dissonant echoes and electronic abrasions created by composers Sebastian Damerius and Johannes Lehniger whose eerie soundscape perfectly compliments the film’s nightmarish imagery. 

 
A fresh new voice in German film featuring two stellar scream queens, a creepy setting and enough of a hallucinatory grip on reality to unnerve even the most dedicated consumers of surreal horror, Sleep though a bit messy here and there is a wonderful addition to the ever-evolving dream & folk horror hybrid picture.  A film that’s as easy to get lost in as the two heroines trying to navigate their way through whatever state of mind or place they’re in, Sleep proves to be an indelible contribution to the ongoing international horror scene and bless the good folks at Arrow Video for bringing this inspired mean and lean little indie horror flick to our scare-starved attention!

--Andrew Kotwicki