Film: In Their Sleep
Release date: 14th February 2011
Certificate: 18
Running time: 79 mins
Director: Caroline du Potet & Éric du Potet
Starring: Anne Parillaud, Arthur Dupont, Thierry Frémont, Jean-Hugues Anglade
Genre: Thriller
Studio: Optimum
Format: DVD
Country: France
Caroline and Eric du Potet's low-key horror/thriller In Their Sleep has been released with little fanfare through Optimum Home Entertainment. With so many similar, higher-profile films failing to surprise nowadays, can this little French film buck the trend and offer something memorable?
For Sarah (Anne Parillaud), life hasn't been the same since her adolescent son died a year ago. She's starting to experience heavy bouts of insomnia, and her DIY-centric husband has moved out of their new work-in-progress home in the countryside. Nowadays, Sarah buries herself in her work at the hospital, much to the chagrin of the supervising nurse who feels that she's unfit to continue her job.
On the way home from a night shift, Sarah is informed by a police roadblock that burglars have been operating in the area, taking advantage of the empty, isolated homes of those away on vacation. Further on down the road, a young man named Arthur (Arthur Dupont) darts out from the woods in front of Sarah's car. She knocks him down but he survives. Sarah takes Arthur back to her house to care for his wounds but quickly realises that Arthur is being pursued by the burglar (Thierry Frémont) that Sarah was warned about.
However, as events start to unfold, it becomes clear to Sarah that something else is going on, and that Arthur may not be all that he seems...
With a minimal cast and a handful of locations, In Their Sleep promises to be a taut, psychological gem, fine tuned with the kind of edge-of-your-seat tension granted to small productions whose meagre budget and resources sharpen the filmmakers' senses and make the most out of everything offered. Sadly, while In Their Sleep is a valiant attempt at such discourse, it doesn't quite succeed.
First time, sibling directors Caroline and Eric du Potet manage to coax pretty good performances from the three main actors. Parillaud excels as the grieving mother, the sole remnants of a family obliterated by tragedy, evincing vulnerability and sadness without the ham that would normally come with such a performance. Frémont also works well, despite being the most underwritten of the three. However, the real star of the show is Dupont, who is able to slip from innocent to potentially dangerous and back again with breathtaking ease.
The results should be tense and portentous, creating suspense worthy of Alfred Hitchcock, but sadly, the actors' efforts are called to serve a fundamentally predictable script that's also a little scattershot in places. Sarah's son's fatal accident at the start of the film ultimately bears very little importance to the events that happen later, except to explain why Sarah lives alone and why she suffers from insomnia. However, both factors feel somewhat moot as their absence probably wouldn't affect the progression of the story. Sarah's vulnerability, loneliness and insomnia, coupled with the fact that the film is called In Their Sleep, suggests the potential for Sarah's subjectivity to be significantly warped, plunging the protagonist into a reality questioning nightmare where her bereavement finally gets the better of her, however, this is not the case.
While that suggestion may sound somewhat derivative and expected, the narrative arc that's on display here – the seemingly innocent being found out for what he is – is perhaps even more derivative, climaxing with the usual finding out of the truth and subsequent chase around a dark and foreboding location; the woods, an isolated house – In Their Sleep has both. Speaking of isolated houses, perhaps the most contrived element of the film's script is Sarah “not getting around” (or words to that effect) to having a telephone installed, despite living there for over a year.
There is a distinct lack of tension throughout, which can partly be attributed to the script that's thin on the type of cat-and-mouse games that this style of narrative was built for, and partly attributed to the film's slim running time. Although it barely reaches 80 minutes, the film still feels overlong. It’s all the more noticeable as it stutters through its underwhelming climax. An overly long flashback towards the tail-end of the second act stalls any momentum that's been building up until then, which in turn muddles the film's perspective: whose story is this exactly?
Everything is competent from a visual standpoint. Pierre Cottereau's cinematography gets the job done nicely but with little flair. The darkly lit locations (including the hospital where Sarah works strangely enough) are convincingly realised apart from a few car shots that seem to have been filmed at dawn or done day-for-night, but this hardly detracts. Blood, gore and violence is fleeting and minimal, no doubt restrained by the film's low budget, but is sufficient to tell the story and used judicially.
In Their Sleep had potential, but ends up wanting. It's good qualities, such as the decent performances from the small yet nicely formed cast, are stuck serving a weak and formulaic story, which plods by with little resonance and emotional engagement. The results are watchable certainly, but not particularly memorable. All in all, In Their Sleep is a competent yet unremarkable debut feature. MP
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