Sleep
Her mother Marlene Engelhardt a flight attendant, her biorhythms are disrupted by her constant travel, taking pills to help her sleep, pills to wake up. Mona taking care of her as best she can, she runs to her as she wakes screaming from the recurring nightmare of the four men, three of whom killed themselves and the fourth who grows stronger.
Convinced that a photograph she found in a magazine is the setting of her dreams, Marlene travels to the Sonnenhügel Hotel in the quiet village of Stainbach in the pastoral valleys of Saxony and recognises everything about it, the three men in the framed portraits in the lobby the faces she has tried to recall, but in her room she suffers a seizure and is hospitalised.
Following her mother’s footsteps, Mona checks into the Sonnenhügel to try to understand what has happened, greeted by the husband and wife who have owned and run it since the death of their business partners, and soon Mona begins to experience the same nightmares herself, seeing visions of the three men, Heino in the attic, Max in the laundry room, Uwe in the pool…
A disorienting drop into dream and nightmare, Sleep (Schlaf) is directed by Michael Venus from a script co-written with Thomas Friedrich, Endzeit‘s Gro Swantje Kohlhof starring as Mona, accustomed to acting as the anchor for her mother but now coming adrift, Marlene (Proxima‘s Sandra Hüller) traumatised and unresponsive, Otto (Downfall‘s August Schmölzer) offering her free run of the hotel, yet reticent to divulge information.
Playing games with the viewer, the layers of Sleep are deliberately vague: is Mona dreaming or remembering, or has she been primed to see these things, a story she once heard that became so ingrained she believed it actually happened to her, resurfacing as she visits the places where it occurred, generations of secrets, blood and shame rising to haunt her?
A thriller with hints of the supernatural, the unquiet dead pushing Mona to express what they cannot, with the incongruous inclusion of two musical numbers Sleep is perhaps overly drawn out but remains engaging even as the pieces of the puzzle slowly fall together to form their unforgiving picture of the guilt of the unconscious mind forcing itself on the cruel, uncaring ego.
Sleep is streaming now on Arrow
