In short: Sleepwalker (2017)

Sarah (Ahna O’Reilly) is returning to college to be a student after some time away and a personal tragedy. Alas, she suffers from nightmares and increasingly severe bouts of the sort of sleepwalking that finds her out on the streets in her absurdly skimpy nightgown. When she goes to her university’s sleep lab and hottie (don’t ask me, guys all look the same to me, but the script says so) sleep scientist Scott White (Richard Armitage) for help, things become even worse. Details of the world around her as well as her past seem to change, only to change back again some time later. These aren’t just small details but things like her last name, or the way her husband died, or who her roommate is.

Haley Joel Osment pops up from time to time to make crazy-eyes at her too, and so on and so forth. It doesn’t take long until Sarah’s close to losing it completely, if her problems aren’t a sign of mental illness anyway. Well, at least Scott is helpful, what with him having pretty inappropriate feelings towards his patient.

The twist ending to Elliott Lester’s horror/mindfuck thriller didn’t exactly come as a complete surprise to me, but at least this is one of the films with a twist where the twist actually belongs to what we’ve seen before. The second one I’ve watched this week, even. Why, there might be hope for Hollywood still. While I still don’t think it’s a completely satisfying twist – I’d have preferred a bit of ambiguity – the film’s playing fair with its audience throughout.

Sleepwalker’s main selling point are the indeed properly dream-like dream sequences, though, and the sometimes subtle, sometimes not so subtle way Lester (and/or Jack Olsen’s script) shifts not the broad strokes of reality around his heroine but its important details, usually homing in on bits that are truly disquieting, little things like her changing handwriting. For most of its running time, it is an atmosphere of doubt the film thrives on, with Sarah losing her faith not just in her sanity and her memory but in what constitutes her identity.

Sleepwalker does have a bit of a melodramatic streak, particularly in Sarah’s relationship with Scott or a pretty abysmal scene where she suffers the horrors of involuntary commitment into a mental institution in a very loud and fake way (please insert your own digression into the portrayal of mental health professionals in genre movies here, imaginary reader). Now, there’s plot reasons why these elements of the film are how they are, yet an explanation isn’t necessarily an excuse.


However – at least if you like the themes of internal confusions about identity and reality in your movies – Sleepwalker’s strong parts easily make up for its weak bits, leaving a really nice surprise of a movie.