Les Somnambules

With surprising performances and a camera in the best Lucrecia Martel style Los Sonámbulos is about family secrets and a lot more. Both the music and the photography are fundamental parts of this drama about a eternal tragedy. Paula Hernandez achieves a sordid and tetric climax relying on excellent performances.

As I settled in to watch "The Sleepwalkers," I expected to be whisked away into a world of gripping suspense and mind-bending twists. Instead, I found myself on a leisurely stroll through a narrative that seemed to be sleepwalking itself, but not in an entirely unenjoyable way. The film, teetering on the edge of the supernatural, does an admirable job of not falling into the abyss of absurdity. It's like going to a haunted house only to find the ghosts are more interested in discussing existentialism than scaring you.

The performances in the film are a bit like a high school drama production - earnest, occasionally impressive, but often just a hair's breadth away from becoming a meme. The lead actor, who spends a considerable amount of time wandering corridors in a somnambulistic haze, delivers lines with the emotional range of a teaspoon. However, it's this very lack of intensity that adds a certain charm to the movie. It's akin to watching your uncle try to act in a community theater play - you know he's not going to win an Oscar, but darn it, he's trying his best.

Where "The Sleepwalkers" really shines is in its unintentional comedy. The script, which I suspect was written during an actual bout of sleepwalking, is peppered with lines so bizarrely out of place they could double as punchlines in a stand-up routine. Combine this with some questionable special effects that would make a 90's sci-fi series blush, and you've got yourself a film that's more amusing than alarming. In conclusion, while "The Sleepwalkers" won't have you on the edge of your seat, it might just have you chuckling in it. And sometimes, that's okay.

After a disturbing prelude, we see Luisa (Érica Rivas), her husband Emilio (Luis Zombrowski) and their daughter Ana (Ornella D'Elía) arrive at the house in the field of Emilio's family to spend the holidays at the end of year. They are awaited there by her mother-in-law Memé (Marilú Marini) and other characters by Daniel Hendler and Valeria Lois, who will later be joined by Alejo (Rafael Federman).

Paula Hernández's film is narrated above all from the point of view of Luisa and partly from Ana's (part of the viewer's task in the initial sections will be to establish the kinship between the characters). Shortly after joining the family group, the unsaid tensions begin to erupt, with coming-of-age shocks, marital conflicts, labor and vocational issues, patrimonial disagreements and a subtle but clear conflict of powers with a certain patriarchal stamp. Not less is Alejo's interference as a catalyst for the new dynamics that is set in motion. And it is about concrete conflicts, not diffuse or vaporous as in a Henry James novel or a Silvina Ocampo story.

Paula Hernández displays a great management of the staging always fully functional to the moods of her characters: sequence shots, travelings, close-ups, blurred, out of fields, achieving climates of claustrophobic oppression when necessary in a film whose tension does not stop growing.

The performances are very good, revealing Hernández's solvency in directing actors (there are several "choral" scenes) but it is Erica Rivas who offers us an astonishing range of nuances with her small gestures, her looks, her tones of voice, in a Luisa that will emerge different from the journey of The Sleepwalkers.

Because as in the later Las siamesas, it is the outer journeys that operate in her female characters as inner journeys where a horizon of liberation appears as possible.

Film selected to represent Argentina in the nominations for the Oscars for Best Foreign Language Film.

When you sit through to the end of a movie out of moral duty you know there's something afoot. Despite the pretty good performances the thematic focus is totally pedestrian and predictable. Ergo, uninspiring.

I'm a woman and not against feminism in art properly done.

But this film just plods along never really rising to any heights that might grab the viewer emotionally or intellectually.

The annual family get together as a trope to explore responsibility, sexism and repression within the extended family has been done to death, most inspirationally by various Scandinavian auteurs. This one just misses the mark in its ordinariness, cinematically speaking.

Three stars for the gorgeous cinematography and general camera work.