The Melbourne International Film Festival, Reviewed
The best, the worst, and the weirdest of what's coming to Australian movie screens in coming months.
The Film That May Ironically Send You To Sleep:
The Nightmare, dir. Rodney Ascher
Reviewed by: Mel Campbell
I really appreciated what Rodney Ascher was trying to do with this film. It would’ve been easy to make a bog-standard documentary about the fascinating phenomenon of sleep paralysis, complete with authoritative talking heads and slow pans over archival photos. Instead, Ascher has interviewed eight people who experience night terrors, and set out to re-enact, using actors and effects, what they experience when they’re lying in bed.
However, this experiment is frustratingly flat and superficial: a mishmash of a horror movie a and shrink appointment that never really terrifies, nor delves into the cross-cultural and psychological aspects of the affliction. The most it manages is a mood of eeriness and unease; it reminded me of the old TV show Unsolved Mysteries, which as a kid scared the absolute shit out of me late at night.
It’s also repetitive. Although the interviewees don’t know each other and have very different backgrounds, certain tropes recur. There’s the sense of an oppressive presence near or even on the bed, difficulty moving and breathing, and visions of malevolent, silhouetted “shadow men” and “hags”.
What comes through most strongly in The Nightmare are the strategies people use to make sense of their sleep paralysis. One sufferer turns to God, convinced she’s seen true evil. Another is determinedly secular, seeking scientific and psychoanalytical explanations. Another has transformed the evil presence into the benevolent ghost of her dead mother. Even the worst sufferer, a wry young New Yorker, has made peace with the inevitability of his nocturnal torment.
Unfortunately, The Nightmare’s attempt to capture subjective experience is the rock on which it flounders. Ascher’s much more successful documentary Room 237 — which explored the claims of The Shining conspiracy theorists — worked because its collage of footage from Kubrick’s film mirrored its interviewees’ obsessive act of watching and interpreting. Indeed, the most interesting part of The Nightmare was the section in which the interviewees recount the films and TV shows that captured images from their night terrors, suggesting how culture guides our personal repertoire of horrific imagery.
However, literally replicating each interview in sound and images — and at times revealing them as staged and artificial, as shadow men walk from one bedroom set to another — strips these people’s experiences of their terror. There’s a lot of repetitive imagery of scared-looking actors twitching in bed, and these idiosyncratic moments — experienced in visceral seriousness — can sink into bathos when actually enacted. (Aliens with TV static for skin! A metallic claw that painfully seizes your dick! An evil roller-blader! Rape by an invisible man! A demonic cat!)
What we find most terrifying is what we don’t see: our imaginations fill in the gaps using a vocabulary of our worst fears. And in reducing other people’s fears to the level of visual banality, Ascher has made sleep paralysis seem less scary.
For fans of: listening to other people talk about their dreams
Opening in Australia: TBC