Sleepwalk

There's not much to recommend this arthouse film written and directed by Sara Driver. The story plays with supernatural bits surrounding an ancient Chinese text, things which felt like shallow orientalism and which never went anywhere, then oddly shifts to a kidnapping. The acting from the leads, Suzanne Fletcher in particular, is terrible, and the surreal elements sprinkled in, like a boy walking a parrot, felt forced. There are some interesting visuals with background lights off a bridge towards the end thanks to Jim Jarmusch, and look for Steve Buscemi in a small role in just his third film, otherwise, forget it. Mercifully just 75 minutes.

The reason why I saw SLEEPWALK was because it's Steve Buscemi's second movie he ever did but he just appeared in some scenes as one of the employees in the translation centre. Regardless of that, it was a different movie viewing experience and made me say 'I certainly have never seen something like this before!' in a good way.

It begins with a Chinese manuscript that is shown and a woman's voice tells what the symbols mean, and it says that there is a chosen person that can unravel the mistery of the prophecy of the ancient Chinese, and that someone is Nicole (Suzanne Fletcher) who works at a translation centre and is seen sleeping near a beach. After Barrington (Tony Todd) manages to steal the manuscript he takes it to his master and after we are introduced to Nicole's office Barrington arrives, with one missing finger, and forces Nicole to translate the text in a matter of three days. She accepts, but as she translates the text everything around her changes in a drastic matter, and we can already see it when Nicole and her roommate Isabelle interact with Nicole's son Jimmy and Isabelle tells to wash her hair, and Nicole finds some patches of hair on the bed. The next day the manuscript's owner Ecco Ecco arrives at the translation centre and asks to Nicole for meeting her on the roof; Nicole waits but Ecco Ecco doesn't arrive.

The next day a detective arrives and tells the boss that a young Chinese woman was found dead and her fingers dismembered: Nicole listens suspiciously. After the work day is over, Nicole takes the elevator and there is a scary atmosphere surrounding the building: on one floor she sees a kid playing with a toy train, on another she sees a man that asks her if she was going down, on another she sees Barrington playing the guitar to his master, on another there is a closed window with a flock of birds that leave except one (as it said in the manuscript) and after she goes away the elevator closes by itself. Returning home, we hear a bombing and some screams: Isabelle has lost her hair (another thing prophetized in the manuscript). Nicole comforts Isabelle telling her to go to the beach and take Jimmy with her, and after Isabelle and Jimmy leave, Nicole walks around at night with the background of the voice that translated the manuscript that echoes throughout the city and Nicole enters her workplace walking through all the rooms and all the phones start ringing, and the manuscript has turned to dust because the prophecy had finally been actuated. As Isabelle leaves the car, a thug steals it unknown that Jimmy was sleeping in the backseat and when Isabelle discovers it she rushes home for warning Nicole who had just returned. Nicole goes for searching Jimmy, who is with the thug that is forced to finding him his home. The thug makes Jimmy seat on a wall near the beach just as Nicole felt asleep and is sleeping not too far. Mother and son might have reunited, but the movie fades to black.

Have you ever found a bizarre plot than the one I just explained? I kid you not, and I had to re-watch the movie again the next day for understanding it better because there are so many details you don't notice the first time. The direction is nice and it seems that the director worked REALLY hard for making the movie as stranger and bizarre as it could! You simply can't imagine that a manuscript has all those powers that transform the life of the woman hired for translating it, and I especially loved the dark atmosphere, it was very gloomy and I have a thing for gloomy stuff. The acting by unknown Suzanne Fletcher was good as that of his roommate even tho she is a bit too ingenue for the most part and doesn't notice that her hair was gradually falling. And the ending, it was very open to the viewer even tho you guess that Nicole might have woken up at some point and would have seen Jimmy, reunited with him and returned home together.

Overall, the most unique movie I have ever seen in some time and something that can be enjoyed only by select fews (such as Nicole that was probably the only one who could translate the Chinese manuscript) including me. I really don't know to who I should recommend it.

I doubt Sara Driver's SLEEPWALK needs to go begging for favorable reviews, and I don't imagine many people who have seen, or who may be tempted to see, the film would bother looking up what the peanut gallery here at IMDb makes of it, but since there is currently only a single review here, and a negative one, I thought I should point out that SLEEPWALK is a beautiful, atmospheric film, in the rich minority tradition of the low-budget American cinema of uncanny mystery and poetry, imaginatively directed, gorgeously photographed, witty and clever, with immaculate performances by Suzanne Fletcher and the great Ann Magnuson. The big mystery surrounding the heroine's translation assignment never fully becomes clear, which I can imagine would be frustrating for some, but the film is not meant to work on a straight plot level, and viewers have to be willing to let go and just go with it, in a pure visual poetry way.