Verdict
Summary
Sleep doesn’t quite have the narrative chops to measure up to Cuckoo, but I still liked how it has a very mysterious sense of the weird and the nightmarish. Both movies could be watched back-to-back with pretty satisfying results, and if you like original horror films, then this one will challenge you from start to finish.
Plot:
While her mother is in a hospital, a young woman stays at a hotel that her family has a mysterious history with.
Review:
Marlene (Sandra Huller, later in Anatomy of a Fall and The Zone of Interest) has long had a mental and psychological block about her past, and when she is led (almost by osmosis or through a pathway of dreams) to a sprawling hotel in the countryside in the middle of a very small village, she cautiously enters the hotel lobby and has a striking and almost paralyzing reaction to it. While in her hotel room, she has a complete mental breakdown and becomes comatose, and she’s taken to the only hospital in the area to recover. Her daughter Mona (Gro Swantje Kohlhof) – a young woman – shows up at the hospital to monitor her progress, but she later checks into the hotel for good measure to see what might’ve triggered her mom’s breakdown. The hotel is in its off season and is remarkably quiet with no guests at all, but the hotel’s owners are an odd, middle-aged couple who have a secret ritual at night: The wife literally restrains her husband to the bed with handcuffs and leg cuffs because in the middle of the night he always tries to kill himself. When Mona is given a walking tour of the hotel, she has startling visions and sees things that’ve happened in the past, namely three “suicides” of three of the previous co-owners of the hotel who may have been killed in rituals. The hotel’s history has a sordid undertone of ritual sacrifice and hosting Nazis, even unto the present day, but as Mona spends more time in and around the hotel, she also sees into her own past through the eyes of her mother who may or not have been a succubus or part of a coven of witches (or something, not exactly sure). When she starts to piece together some abstract clues about all this, Mona makes herself a target for the cult that runs the hotel, but in the meantime her mother in the hospital starts to snap out of it and might be sleepwalking her way to revenge for all the misdeeds done to her as a child …
Sleep, a German language psychological thriller / horror film from filmmaker Michael Venus, is a strikingly unusual piece of cinema, and I found it remarkably similar (at least in tone and execution) to the recent film Cuckoo which takes place in a huge hotel / resort in Bavaria while a young woman is terrorized by a really bizarre cult operating out of the resort. Sleep doesn’t quite have the narrative chops to measure up to Cuckoo, but I still liked how it has a very mysterious sense of the weird and the nightmarish. Both movies could be watched back-to-back with pretty satisfying results, and if you like original horror films, then this one will challenge you from start to finish.
Arrow Video’s recent release of Sleep on Blu-ray comes in a Limited Edition package that is loaded with special features, and there are enough bonus features and content to keep you going for hours. As per Arrow’s usually high quality releases, this one is tops in every way.
Bonus Materials
- High Definition Blu-ray (1080p) presentation
- Original DTS-MA 5.1 audio
- Optional English subtitles
- Audio commentary by film critic and historian Kim Newman & author Sean Hogan
- A Strange Dark Magic, a visual essay by film scholar Alexandra Heller-Nicholas
- Sleepwalking through National Trauma, a visual essay by film critic Anton Bitel
- Dream & Folktale in Sleep, an interview with anthropologist, dream researcher, and filmmaker Louise S. Milne
- Talking in their Sleep, director Michael Venus and star Gro Swantje Kohlhof in conversation
- A Dream We Dream Together, a compilation of film festival introductions created during lockdown by director Michael Venus and the cast of Sleep
- Making Dreams Come True, a glimpse behind the scenes of Sleep
- Deleted Scenes
- Marlene’s Sketches, explore the many obsessive dream journal sketches that are only glimpsed in the film, created by artist Christoph Vieweg, presented here in full
- Trailer
- Image gallery
- Reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Oink Creative
- Illustrated collector’s booklet featuring new writing by Alison Peirse, an interview with director Michael Venus, and Brothers Grimm fairy tale ‘Frau Trude’
- Double-sided fold-out poster featuring newly commissioned artwork by Oink Creative
