OVERVIEW
Sleepwalker is a psychological thriller about Sarah, a mother trapped in the same nightmare each night, replaying the accident that killed her daughter and left her ex-husband in a coma. As the dreams intensify, she starts experiencing sleepwalking episodes that become increasingly more dangerous, putting Sarah and those around her at risk.
BACKGROUND
The film marks Brandon Auman’s feature directorial debut, after a career largely in animation writing and showrunning, with credits including Star Wars: Resistance and The Legend of Vox Machina. Auman wrote and directed the film, expanding his 2024 short into a feature.
EXECUTION
From Shakespeare’s Macbeth to Soderbergh’s Side Effects and Jason Yu’s underseen 2023 film Sleep, sleepwalking has often been used as a companion to guilt and mental collapse. The idea of a phenomenon that drives our bodies to perform unconscious actions, guided by repressed sentiment, offers plenty of opportunity to unsettle. So a thriller that uses it as a way for a mother to process the loss of a daughter is, while not the most original or subtle premise, not without potential.
Sleepwalker, unfortunately, fails to achieve even the bare minimum or to bring any interesting angle to its setup. As a thriller, it offers little in the way of scares or unease, leaning on jump scares and overused imagery (yelling characters with pupils filling the whole eye), plus a few unimaginative choices (hands with extra fingers), all wrapped in generally poor execution. As a character study, it moves through simplistic beats and familiar clichés, from the incredulous mother and the ambitious agent to the abusive husband.
Neither past nor present offers much to hold our attention. The flashback structure promises a late reveal, yet it does not take more than ten minutes to connect the puzzle pieces and see where the film is headed. There is no complexity to uncover, no hidden information. What you see is what you get, and even that is delivered through exposition rather than dramatization. Basic questions go unanswered (what made Sarah marry this guy in the first place, and what changed?), to the point where it feels like the film needs a flashback to explain the flashbacks. In the present day, Sarah’s artistic side is hinted at, but the movie is so uninterested in exploring anything beyond its blunt plot beats that I found myself surprised whenever it cut back into yet another flashback.
It ends up as an unpleasant watch. You either sit through dialogue so bad it makes you want to sink into your couch (after Sarah describes her dreams, her agent replies, “You are haunted.”… really?!?), or you wait for a “twist” that the movie telegraphs so heavily it feels unnecessary. There is nothing to cheer for. The characters are broadly unlikable, the build-ups do not register, and significant actions carry no consequences (as in a scene involving stairs). And when you think it cannot get worse, it wraps itself in what is very likely a contender for the worst ending of the year, and we are still in the first half of January.
AFTERTASTE
It brings me no joy to be so negative toward a small film such as Sleepwalker, which was filmed in 11 days and had obvious production limitations. But cinema has shown time and time again that greatness can come from constraints, and as such, a small film like this deserves the same respect as a larger production. Judged on those terms, Sleepwalker is an awfully directed film, full of amateurish dialogue and akward performances, a thriller that doesn’t scare, and a drama with no interesting exploration. An altogether bad experience that will make you wish you were the one sleeping.