Sleep Tight (Mientras Duermes - original title)

Language: Spanish 
Genre: Horror/thriller

Length: 102

Director: Jaume Balagueró

Writer: Alberto Marini

Cast: Luis Tosar, Marta Etura, Alberto San Juan

Plot

César is a concierge for a residential building; he’s depressed and only feels marginally better when others are suffering. He is particularly obsessed with the ever happy Clara, and takes ever increasingly creepy and violent measures to ensure her misery.

Review

The film starts with César standing on a ledge of the apartment building ready to commit suicide, by the end of this film you will wish he had, because the journey to find out why César wants to take his own life is a depressing one. He is, it turns out, a revolting human being. Lusi Toser gives a convincing performance as the sinister César who is at times thoroughly gruesome and at others completely charming.   Marta Etura also gives a fine performance as Clara but isn’t really challenged. Her job is only to be annoyingly and ceaselessly happy; Clara is the muse to César’s criminal artistry.

  

This film works well as both a horror and thriller, but the tone feels a little uneven, a gruesome murder scene in the last third of the film is unexpected and out of place as we are given no clue that César also has homicidal tendencies.

  

Sometimes the plot is unbelievable and outlandish and the use of chloroform seems useless as it will only render a victim unconscious for a few minutes (for longer periods of unconsciousness the victim must be forced to inhale the vapor often, but you didn’t read that here…). So for César to use the chemical on Clara once then spend the night sleeping with her, wouldn’t work, she would surely awaken.

  

There is a little black comedy to lighten the black mood, especially from the preteen girl who lives across the hall from Clara. She has witnessed César’s nightly comings and goings through the spy hole in her front door, and she is blackmailing him for money and porn.

  

The film is well shot with some particularly lovely compositions.  And the setting of the old residential building makes this film feel as if it were set in some other time.

In the end this film is really a character study on obsession and perversion and if you were not depressed when you started watching, this film you will be when it’s over.

Budget:   4 million pounds, shot on 35mm.  The director has previously had success with low budget horror’s Rec and Rec2.

3 out of 5 stars.