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| All images courtesy: Wild Eye Releasing |
The 2023 British indie horror film Watch Me Sleep gets belated US distribution this month from Wild Eye Releasing. But Wild Eye aren’t doing the film any favors, hiding the movie behind truly hideous cover art that reeks of AI slop, and bizarrely releasing the film only on DVD, as far as physical media goes (digital HD as well, at least). But look past the lame cover (which the filmmakers would have had no say in) and the SD-only physical release and give this movie a shot, because Watch Me Sleep is surprisingly good: a very effective indie chiller which builds up a palpable sense of dread and anticipation. It has some genuinely creepy moments, confident slow-burn pacing that pays off, and an unexpected but very welcome undertone of folk-horror. I must admit that after seeing the cover art, I popped this screener disc in with rock-bottom expectations; I was very pleasantly surprised to instead be won over by a horror indie that takes its clearly DIY budget and does some very impressive things.
Sean has just come home to the small town where he grew up to bury his mom. But he isn’t grieving; he’s relieved that she’s dead. As a child he was ritualistically abused by his mom and her circle of creepy friends, and left with knife scars all over his body, vague but disturbing memories of cult-like rituals performed on their property, and an alcohol addiction that he is struggling to stay clean from. In an effort to get closure and put his traumatic past behind him, he contacts a company called Watch Me Sleep, who sells battery-operated wi-fi webcams you can install in a loved one’s coffin; the idea is that one would use it to say a final farewell if the funeral is not closure enough, but he wants it so he can reassure himself that she is really dead, and he is truly free. But when he sees and hears some strange, inexplicable things on the webcam, he starts to fear that even in death his mom is still tormenting him, and that the ritualistic horrors of his childhood are not over. But as he struggles alone in his mom’s empty house, is he a victim of something paranormal or occult, or is it his own fraying sanity and struggle with addiction playing tricks on him?
Watch Me Sleep savors the slow-burn of that question, specializing in prolonged moments of dread where we are made to feel Sean’s uncertainty, and question the reliability of his perception. Many times throughout the movie, Sean sits with his laptop or phone open to the homepage of the Watch Me Sleep website, debating whether or not to enter the code to see the live feed of his mom’s coffin-cam, terrified of what he might see… and every time, we feel the tension and dread building in the air. Director John Williams builds suspense in the movie’s deliberately agonizing moments of waiting, making us imagine what we might see on the camera, and whether it’s better to know, or stay in ignorance. Williams’ pacing is confident, staying on shots and in moments long enough that stillness turns into anticipation of something frightening happening; it’s a classic slow-burn, executed very well. And the movie does a great job of making Sean an unreliable narrator, so that we are kept on our toes about whether all of this is truly supernatural, or if we are watching a descent into alcohol and trauma induced paranoia.
The movie is very, very low-budget, and clearly a DIY indie feature, but that confident slow-burn, and the creeping dread that it instills, overcomes most of its budgetary limitations and obstacles. Getting to this point, however, does take a bit. Until the atmosphere of dread has a chance to establish itself and sink its claws into you, the low-budget filmmaking and its rough-around-the-edges quality causes the movie to get off to a fairly weak start. The audio is uneven in quality, and the cinematography is mostly in the good-enough area, although the film does pull off some really strong shots and images from time to time. The acting is also the mixed bag one might expect from an indie like this. The lead actor, Darren McAree, in particular gives a performance which is oddly uneven. He can be very good in dialogue scenes; in one scene where he describing to an AA meeting why he feels such relief that his mom is dead, he is great. But when it comes to his physical acting and particularly his facial expressions, he can be so over-the-top and arch that his performance occasionally borders on camp. He feels a bit like a theater actor playing to the back of the house, but in close-up it’s way too much. Fortunately as the film goes on, and the movie gets more and more into his head, this is less of a problem, and I found that his performance improved as the film did, and was once again helped out by director Williams’ excellent use of tension and suspense.
One other obstacle the film must overcome is that the very premise of the Watch Me Sleep company’s existence feels far-fetched, and a little absurd; would enough people really want to see a live feed of their loved ones in their coffins that someone could build a business around it? Personally I doubt it, and I think the film would have worked better if the camera was something that Sean had installed on his own. Once the plausibility of that concept is put behind us, though, and we are in the reality of Sean alone in the house with the temptation to either look at the camera feed or not, it works much better. It is also worth noting that Watch Me Sleep came out in the UK a year before David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds, which similarly has a central plot element of being able to see the dead in their coffins; I’m sure there will be viewers discovering the film as a US new release in 2026 who write the whole thing off as being a low-budget The Shrouds ripoff, but the film’s original release date shows that that is simply not true. It also takes that shared basic premise in a completely different direction, less about grief and more about trauma, and despite the initial implausibility, sells the premise quite effectively.
In addition to the confidently creepy and effective slow-burn, the other area where the film really surprised me and won me over was the inclusion of folk-horror elements. Sean’s nightmares/flashbacks include lots of spooky folk-horror imagery, shot in high-contrast black and white. Many of these shots are gorgeous, and very creepy – absolutely the most well-shot stuff in the movie, with an eerie dreamlike quality, and effectively teasing air of mystery. They add another layer to the obvious question of, “is this all real, or in Sean’s head:” if it is real, what kind of occult creepiness is going on here? These sequences really give director Williams and company a chance to show off what they’re capable of artistically, even on a shoesting.
All in all, I was pleasantly surprised and pretty impressed by Watch Me Sleep, and wound up genuinely enjoying it. It is absolutely a very low-budget film, and has many of the flaws and shortcomings that one might expect from such a production, so a certain patience for those flaws and lenience with them will certainly help your enjoyment. But with that low budget it achieves some impressive things: strong atmosphere, some great folk-horror visuals, and a tense and palpable sense of dread. Those strong points more than outweigh its micro-budget quirks, and when Let Me Sleep works, it really works. This is quite a good indie.
And as such, it deserved better than the apathetic release it has gotten from Wild Eye. It may be a low-budget film that appears to have been shot on not the most expensive cameras, but it still deserved a physical blu-ray release, and not just DVD and HD digital. The encoding on this DVD is pretty apathetic as well, with moments of compression and blocking, and occasional frame rate issues; nothing ruinous, but indicative of the level of care (or lack thereof) put into the release. The cover art also reeks of AI slop, and the back cover description has a lot about it that is simply incorrect, and not accurate to the plot of the film, so it was clearly written by someone who didn’t even watch the movie (or it was also written by AI). But at least it is US distribution for the film, after a three year delay, so hopefully it will end up being a good thing for the filmmakers, despite the apathy of the release itself. And at least there is the digital HD option. I would definitely recommend that horror fans overlook the cheap nature of this physical release, and give Watch Me Sleep a chance. It’s a solid indie that deserves the look.
- Christopher S. Jordan