Slumber (2017)

Do you know what I haven't been getting alot of lately? SLEEP. And I wish it was owing to the fact that it's spooky season and I'd watched something that had genuinely scared the absolute shit out of me, but in reality it's because my work life is horrendously busy at the moment and I had to cancel movie night last night because I was in London and didn't get home till late. But here I am, back for part 3 of my blogs spooky season with Slumber. A 2017 British Indie film by Goldcrest Films who, from what I gather, are genuinely supposed to be quite good at this, and are bringing us a movie where a unassuming Northern English family are terrorised by horrific demon that paralyses it's victims in their sleep. I am genuinely, really looking forward to this and hope it's one of those good FTW movies and not one of those shit ones.

Dr Alice Arnolds (Maggie Q) is an expert in psychological disorders that prevent or otherwise interfere with natural sleeping cycles, and when she is introduced to the Morgan family; who describe how they are all suffering from intense trauma induced by particularly nasty sleep walking episodes and at the end of their collective tethers, she collectively begins to analyse and examine the family in hopes that she can diagnose and cure the mental issues plaguing them. After we spend a night with the family which clearly displays the extent of the extreme sleep trauma they are experiencing, we also learn that Alice is suffering from her own emotional trauma, having lost her brother at a young age to a similar sleep haunting, and she too begins to exhibit symptoms of sleep walking, jolting from a nightmare to discover she sleep walked all the way out into the back yard...The following night, the family: Mum Sarah (Kirsten Bush), Dad Charlie (Sam Troughton), Son Daniel (Lucas Bond) and Daughter Emily (Honor Kneafsey) spend the night at Dr. Arnolds'... well... hospital I guess, where the family share a room whilst various bodily functions are monitored by the Doctor. However like clockwork at exactly the same time, all 3 of the family members except Daniel begin to sleepwalk, whilst Daniel becomes paralysed and writhers in pain, barely able breathe. Bursting in, Alice and her assistant wake the family up but not before a sleep walking Charlie almost strangles her to death, with Alice only saved when the Janitor, Cameron (Vincent Adriano) smashes a mop over his head. Discovering bruising in the shape of hands on Daniel's chest and having just nearly strangled Alice to death, Charlie is arrested and lead away by police but it doesn't sit well with Alice, who continues to believe there is more to this case than others would potentially believe. Whilst reviewing CCTV footage from the Morgan family night, she is interrupted by Cameron who tells Alice he's handed in his notice but also warns her never to see the Morgan family ever again before handing her a note that reads "nocnitsa" and then just sort of... running off.. The following night things don't get any better with Papa Morgan not around. As Sarah tries to stay awake, she accidentally nods off for a few moments and whilst she does Emily murders the family dog with a pair of hedge trimmers and Daniel suffers his worst encounter with the sleep demon yet, with his bed fully lifting from the floor this time and screams in agony whilst in the clutches of the invisible ghost. The following morning, after confessing to her husband that she is having the nightmares again, Alice heads to the hospital with the intention of asking for some time off but is confronted by a hysterical Sarah in the atrium, she continues to study their file before driving to speak to Charlie herself, and picking him up from the police station, driving him home where they discover more chaos going on in the middle of the night. Daniel's hauntings this time, the most intense yet, and when Charlie manages to break down the door to his bedroom whatever it is haunting Daniel bursts out of the room and sends Alice sprawling down the hallway. The following morning, after Alice has a mild freak out waking up in the Morgan's house, she and Charlie pay a visit to Cameron's place where, despite his objections to helping them, catch the attention of his Grandpa, Amado, (Sylvester McCoy), who also struggles to sleep. In a semi-lucid state he reveals to Charlie that he knows of a demon; the night hag, or nocnitsa, that seeks out children who struggle to sleep to feast on them before eventually killing them and that he too suffered as a child but survived when it killed another child in his place. He tells them there is no hope for Daniel, and no way he can be saved... For... some reason... Alice takes Cameron and his Grandad to the Morgan's house where they try to keep an incredibly weak Daniel from falling asleep, in fear that one more episode will end up killing him. As they listen on to the Amado ramble about the night hag, the whole group witness as Daniel's bed his dragged across the room and he slips into deep sleep paralysis. Snatching him from the bed, his dad dumps him in a bath of ice water but that only makes things worse when Daniel slips beneath the water level and almost drowns, rescued only when Alice brings him to with a injection of adrenaline into his leg. As we learn that Alice's own daughter is beginning to have trouble sleeping herself, Alice becomes more determined to save Daniel and when Amado makes a throwaway comment about sleepwalking, Alice suggests to the rest of the family that maybe they can't save Daniel whilst they are awake, but maybe they can save him whilst they're asleep? Despite initially being sceptical, the family come round to it and they even let Cameron, a man they had never met until yesterday take their daughter away for safety... Using some prescription strength sleeping drugs, Alice administers dosages to everyone except Daniel to ensure they can sleep, including injecting herself but when everyone including Daniel fall to sleep except her, Alice begins to panic and wonder why, momentarily taking her eyes of Daniel, only for him to vanish when she turns around. As she wanders around the house searching for him she suddenly realises that she herself is having a nightmare, a flashback to her brother dying when she was a child. We then get insights into the other nightmares with Sarah obsessed with criticism of her teeth and Charlie obsessing over the loss of his baby son. As the others are locked in their own nightmares, Amado watches on as he can see the... night... demon thing feasting on Daniel, and when he tries to help the creature suffocates him and takes control of his body. Awaking from her nightmare, Alice rushes downstairs to find Amado laughing and with a roar, Alice is swept into the mirror on the wall behind her, smashing and collapsing to the ground in a pile. She watches on semi-conscious as Amado heads to Daniel and begins choking him, but gaining consciousness, she plunges a shard of the broken mirror into Amado, killing him and ending the demon at the same time. Presumably. In the closing scenes we learn that Daniel survived the night and presumably is able to start sleeping normally again, but owing to the events Alice now finds herself sectioned in a mental health facility, obsessed with the idea that her daughter will suffer like Daniel did...

Ooooh this was a spooky one! As somebody who suffered with insomnia as a kid, I can kinda relate to some of the stuff they featured here: the strange figures in the shadows, the hearing voices. I used to have it bad when I was younger, but as I got older I grew out of it to a degree, although I still occasionally get bouts of it. I used to get up and watch movies which was how I got introduced to American Psycho and Secretary which are low key some of favourite movies, but uh anyway, yeah, this was alright. I mean, there were parts of it where I felt it got a bit wobbly, and some of the acting was a bit corny, and it was peppered with plot holes, but it was... ok. It was interesting enough.

Despite maybe borrowing from other home haunting movies a little bit, I'm prepared to cut this one a bit a slack and say that for the most part it was pretty original, pretty fresh. Sure you get other movies about things coming to visit you at night whilst you're sleeping but I liked here that the exploration of what it was was more of an abstract concept and less defined. I mean, for example in Nightmare on Elm Street, you fucking know its Freddy Kruger. Here: not so much. It's this abstract idea that what it is is the Night Hag, or Nocnista. But it's never especially defined as such.

And bonus points for the scripting and the production. This was a very well paced movie in my opinion. They gave you just enough exposition at the beginning to establish Alice and the Morgan's and then cut straight to the meat of the movie: the trauma they were going through and how it connected to Alice, before building to a conclusion in the last 20 odd minutes. And it was shot really interestingly: there was a whole bunch of creative camera angles, camera placements used to tell the story. Perhaps my only one complaint is that there wasn't ever really any front on shots, you always felt like the scene was playing out just to side of where you should be watching, but maybe that was a creative choice, to make you feel a bit more embedded in the events?

Although where it's low budget does start to show was in the acting. For the most part, nobody is really bad as such. Maggie Q as Alice was mostly fine, she get's a little vanilla in the 'women experiencing emotional trauma' sections but never to the point that it got disbelievable. Kristen Bush as Sarah is fantastic as the grieving mother figure, and similarly Sam Troughton as Charlie does enough to break the mould beyond being a wooden father figure. Lucas Bond as Daniel too really, genuinely looked like he was absolutely terrified and exhausted in equal measure throughout the whole thing. It was more the supporting roles where the cheapness shined through and although Maggie Q was decent for the latter half of the film, the half where she was the mother and the wife just felt a bit artificial and phoned in for me. 

And similarly although being paced well, and produced well, there were moments where the movie just got a little bit ridiculous and silly for me, more so in the latter half of the movie when they begin to delve deeper in the haunting. I feel like if you had dialled that back and kept it grounded in the gritty, more factual depiction of the haunting and not delved more into the corny nightmare stuff and the over-the-top action scenes involving the nightmare monster, it would have made the movie just that little bit more edgy and gripping. When the creature first bursts out the room and sends Sarah sprawling down the hallway it sorta lost a little bit of respect from me as up until then, it had kept everything inside the realm of the (mostly) believable.

And those two points in consideration, it's a bit of a shame really. Because I felt like this had all the foundations, and most of the work done to put together what could have been a really gritty psychological horror movie. But it was in the parts where I felt like they overcompensated a bit to try and be a 'horror' movie that it lost points for me. And in some of the bits in the beginning where they shoehorned in some jump scares to try and unsettle the audience but then never really capitalise on that, that I felt the movie did itself a disservice. It didn't need those things, and instead if it had tried to be more it's own thing and more subtle and psychological with the haunting I think it would have made for a better movie.

But - and accounting for the fact that I've already said in other posts before now that horror movies are not really my thing - I genuinely thought this was one of the better movies I've covered for spooky season. Leagues ahead of feardotcom and Slenderman and they were supposed to be mainstream movies. For a little Indie movie it was decent and it was clear real care and attention was put into making it. There was effort and it was a trier. But sadly I felt it just didn't quite live up to the potential it could have been and there were moments that it lost me, and those moments outshined the parts that I was really into. Strong 2 out of 5.