They consider moral qualms as weak and enjoy the pain of people they hold in contempt. They consider other people as disposable – especially women. They have negligible regard for long term planning and care nothing for consequences. Which, as we enter the third decade of the 21st century, basically means the extreme right, because video game nerds and Nazis being practically cognate, it turns out, is an unexpected cultural pass not confined to English speaking countries. The sort of person who would do this to someone is the sort of person who would find gleeful enjoyment in watching a woman being traumatised beyond the point of being able to form coherent thought and posting puerile and casually misogynistic jokes in a live chat. And specifically Sleepless Beauty is about what you would have to do in real life to create a Manchurian Candidate-style assassin, and to a lesser extent it approaches the sort of person who would do this to someone.
Assassin of sleepless town movie#
So it’s a movie about the process of brainwashing, which is why I sought it out as soon as I heard about it, because that’s a thing I care about. Here is the plot of Sleepless Beauty, in its entirety: an ambassador survives an assassination attempt Mila (Polina Davydova) is kidnapped and taken to “Recreation”, a run-down industrial site, where she is not permitted to sleep her captors subject her to a creative parade of physical, psychological and surgical processes intended to brainwash her into becoming a killer, her only human contact being a silent man who brutalises and confines her (Evgeniy Gagarin) all of the time that this is happening, she is watched on a Twitch-style livestream by a community of internet gamers who make incessant, callous comments on her plight she is released no longer able to recognise her father because of the trauma she has experienced, she murders him in a frenzy and then retreats into a persistent vegetative state satisfied with their efforts, the culprits then kidnap the ambassador's soon-to-be-ex-wife, which fact reveals that Mila’s torment served no other purpose than a dry run to see if a planned act of terrorism would work. III was well done, competently performed and beautifully designed, but I remembered being oddly uderwhelmed by it, without really remembering why, and something about watching Sleepless Beauty nagged at me a bit, so I decided to go back and watch it again.īut first, the more recent one. Sleepless Beauty is directed by Pavel Khvaleev and written by his wife Aleksandra Khvaleeva, and they also worked together on the 2015 folk horror piece III (AKA III: The Ritual), which I originally passed over as a candidate for inclusion in We Don’t Go Back after seeing it because at the time I didn’t feel it had a whole lot to say.
What it sets out to do, however, is to present an entirely nihilistic and depressing portrayal of the worst impulses of human nature, and the worst things humans can do to humans, and then to indict the viewer for participating. You’ve been warned.įor what it is, Sleepless Beauty is not a technically bad movie. The same goes to a slightly lesser extent for its 2015 predecessor III. Do you want to see it? That’s a question that inspires an inhalation through gritted teeth, really.
But in giving away what there is of the film’s plot, I rob you of having any reason to see it.
Also, there isn’t a whole lot of plot to give away. This is because everything that's interesting in the movie – and there’s quite a lot that’s interesting – is rear-loaded, and depends upon you having seen it. I am going to give away all the plot developments in the Russian torturefest that is Sleepless Beauty (the original title, Я не сплю, translates as “I am not sleeping”).
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