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Out of the blue, Mila (Polina Davydova), an inconspicuous English
teacher, is kidnapped, thrown into a large but barren room, and tortured,
both mentally and physically, by a voice from a loudspeaker on one hand,
and a black-masked man (Evgeniy Gagarin) on the other. Her objective here
seems, she has to fulfill certain tasks every day to remain alive, and she
mustn't, under any circumstances, sleep. The tasks range from the ordinary
(like finding the right key to unlock a box in a certain amount of time)
to the gruesome (like being trapped in a box with three hungry rats) to
the inhuman (like answering a question in a quiz correctly for someone
else to die before her very eyes), while freedom's always dangling in
front of her, just out of reach. But why all this? At first it looks
like nothing but a perverted piece of live entertainment for degenerates
on the dark web who throw mean comments at her in the chat during the live
broadcast of her ordeal, but it eventually becomes clear that something
much more sinister is at work, something that involves brain-washing via
sleep deprivation, VR and a bit of advanced surgery ... Now Sleepless
Beauty is definitely a film that will remain on your mind for a few
days after watching, and not exactly in a soothing way, as the film's
disturbing and mean and weird - and all of this is meant as an utter
compliment. Now sure, the premise of the film is more than a little
reminiscent of Saw, but while that
movie moves safely within genre boundaries, Sleepless Beauty leaves
the safety of a formula behind the longer it goes and starts to show more
and more of a subversive edge. And the direction really gives the film's
story to grow naturally rather than just focussing on effects, while
Polina Daydova delivers a very convincing performance as a woman slowly
breaking under the weight of what's thrown at her. And the animated
sequences from Mila's VR journey sure deserve special mention, something
like a perverted version of the animation Terry Gilliam did for Monty
Python.
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