Sleep (2020): An Elusive Waking Dream from the heartland of Germany (Review)

Arrow’s release of Sleep / Schlaf, the debut feature of German director Michael Venus, on Blu-ray is not to be slept on. Puns aside, the film lives up to its name with a dreamy aesthetic and storyline that creeps under your skin. We start with Marlene playing a game of Jenga with her daughter, Mona, which takes a strange turn as the scene is dramatically revealed to be a dream, as Marlene literally falls back into reality.

These strange dreams regularly occur for Marlene but it is the recurrent presence of a hotel that particularly haunts her. She documents these dreams in a sketchbook, which is included in full as a slideshow on the disc so we can see how much detail artist Christoph Vieweg put into these sketches and how they reflect Marlene’s obsessiveness. Utilising her job as a flight attendant, Marlene is able to find the hotel from her dreams and visits it only for a strange encounter causing her to be hospitalised.

For the rest of the film, we follow Mona who has been looking after her mother and follows her to the hotel, finding herself caught between dream and reality. Stylistically, there is an obvious comparison to David Lynch with its ordinariness and matter of fact strangeness, but Venus has his own style. The narrative is somewhat elusive lending it an unpredictability as it shifts between fairytale, disturbing psychological horror and angry political commentary. Mona and Marlene provide the audience with something to hold on to and their relationship provides emotional depth that means the film avoids getting lost in its heady themes.

The supplements accompanying the film attempt to provide answers to these questions from numerous angles. Oddly, the visual essays are accompanied with spoiler warnings suggesting that there are people out there who would watch these before the film. In fairness, this could be an interesting way to approach the film as Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and Anton Bitel provide two very different interpretations. In ‘A Strange Dark Magic – Remember to Breath: Navigating Michael Venus’ Sleep’, Heller-Nicholas packs a lot into fifteen minutes drawing on her work on masks in horror and their ritualistic purposes. While these are a relatively minor aspect of Sleep, Heller-Nicholas convincingly extrapolates their use as communicating power coming from transformation and reflecting the film’s theme of primal connection superseding rational explanation.

Bitel takes a more structural approach in ‘Sleepwalking through National Trauma’ by arguing that the game of Jenga at the start of the film is programmatic for how it tells its story. He elucidates the film’s narrative as illustrating how building or making progress is to undermine existing structures to the point of collapse. Again, this is a brief video and makes me wish there was space to dive more into the ideas Bitel brings up. He also highlights the film’s allusions to the video game Silent Hill and classic films like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Don’t Look Now, An American Werewolf in London and The Shining; it is no coincidence that these all explore how the repressed always returns on a familial and personal level.

The release further reflects how a film like this encourages numerous interpretations with another video from Louise S. Milne on use of dreams and folktales, while Kim Newman and author and filmmaker Sean Hogan provide an audio commentary, in a departure from their typical work on older releases. Venus himself contributes towards these discussions in an interview with lead actress Gro Swantje Kohlhof. As an older first-time director, Venus demonstrates great cinema knowledge and explains how he was inspired by “art house horror” that deals with ideas and confronts its audience rather than allow for escapism.

An unexpected revelation from the behind-the-scenes supplements is Venus’ sense of humour. With Kohlhof, he created several humerous introduction videos for festival screenings, which they were mostly unable to attend due to Covid. Behind the scenes footage and deleted scenes round off this release that provides a lot to mull over. But the film alone provides such depth of thought and highlights Venus as one to watch for future curious horrors.

Mike’s Archive: Sleep (2020)