The Sleepwalker review - symbols clash but the plot stays sound

An indie drama without a budget can be a frightful thing. To keep things afloat you better have sharp actors and good writing and it doesn’t hurt to get crafty with production design. I’m not ashamed to admit there have been plenty of small relationship flicks I’ve ultimately interrupted with “Ugh, leave me alone, I’ve got my own problems!” Luckily, this is not one of those times.

The Sleepwalker debuted at this year’s Sundance film festival, the most fertile ground for stories about far-fetched dysfunction that want to be considered art, but are more like exercises in gossip. The premise sounds dreadful. A scarred (like, physically scarred) woman is repairing her large and isolated family house (symbolism!) when her distant, frazzled half-sister appears out of the blue announcing a pregnancy (more symbolism!). Each has a boyfriend. One is working-class; the other has a nice car and seems manipulative.

“Stop! Stop!” I can hear you crying. Despite this smorgasbord of seemingly rote indie cliche, director and co-writer Mona Fastvold, with her first feature film, is living proof that cinematic style can elevate nearly any source material. I was, much to my own surprise, engrossed in this story from pretty much the first frame.

Kaia (Norwegian actress Gitte Witt) is our heroine - another gorgeous, somewhat worn object in the large, Bauhaus structure in the woods. Fastvold approaches with snapshots: a Smith Corona typewriter, a closet stuffed with furs, a dusty sill of dead flies and this trim, braless woman changing clothes to make sure we see the burn marks across her breast. (Kaia will show us, the audience, but she keeps her nightgown on during a lovemaking scene with her boyfriend.)

The boyfriend is Andrew, a contractor, played by Christopher Abbott. He’s miles away from the millennial playground of Girls where he played Marnie’s boyfriend Charlie for two seasons. With a beard and voice deeper than Liev Schreiber’s, he exudes a classic, gentle masculinity that, so my single friends tell me you don’t much find on Tinder these days. The arrival of Kaia’s slightly maniacal half-sister Christine (Stephanie Ellis) places the ball on the tee and her boyfriend, the creepily well-heeled Ira (Brady Corbet) launches on to the green.

Corbet, Fastvold’s co-writer, is instantly dislikable. The way he calls Christine “babe” is repulsive and when he jokes (twice!) that if she disappears in the middle of the night again he’ll have to “tie her up” many viewers may need to reach for an air sickness bag. But as the film drifts on, there’s a revelation – he’s actually not the bad guy!

The unplanned sibling visit turns into a socially awkward weekend getaway. There’s table banter and and after-dinner dancing (to instrumental Yo La Tengo) in the vast, lamp-lit parlor. These scenes glide along, evolving into near surrealism once our characters turn in for the night and succumb to the titular somnambulism. (Sleepwalking isn’t just a metaphor in this family.) The original score punctuates the dreamlike quality, head-faking more than once into horror territory. There’s also some freaky, frank sexuality to cut through the haze. The performances are restrained, as are storytelling revelations in the third act. I swear it isn’t just because of Fastvold’s Scandinavian roots, but it isn’t out of line to compare The Sleepwalker to one of Ingmar Bergman’s house-bound psychological dramas.

Some of the moodier passages may be a tad pretentious, but what are the alternatives? To tell this story straight would be pointless. (One could say the same thing about Simon Killer, an effective “angry young American abroad” film starring and co-written by Brady Corbet that goes all-in on mood.) The core of The Sleepwalker is the slow onion peel to find out “what really happened with that fire”. The movie is smart enough to know that observing characters coming to terms with this is far more interesting than the mystery itself.