Director: Niven Wilson
Cast: Nils Wilson
Running time: 4mins
Niven Wilson’s second return to Indy Film Library will divide opinion. Those who have seen his last two efforts will probably say that’s on-brand. But while Don’t Shoot the President and Eat the Rich were experimental, Sleep Stalker walks a fine line between experimental filmmaking, and experimenting with filmmaking.
Making a film as a proof of concept – or even simply as the testing ground of one particular idea you might want to flesh out later – is a risky business. If the outcome of your efforts does not present a vision singular enough to stand on its own, you risk leaving your audience feeling like they are being served off-cuts, and that their time is not being valued.
There are moments when this is a real danger here. Not least the almost pandemic-era minimalism of some of the earlier moments – in which a nameless individual (played by Nils Wilson) sits up in a conspicuously pristine, white bed, in a house so plainly unlived in that the for sale sign might as well be in the window. Considering Wilson’s previous animated efforts were so rich in detail – looking to find ways to disgust, amuse or scare us at every turn – the absence of set-dressing flags the sense that this is someone experimenting with shooting live imagery on the fly.
While that feeling of things being a bit too neat soon fades, there is also a feeling that Nils Wilson might have been given a bit more to do in his performance. When things do take a more sinister turn, Niven Wilson does not seem especially interested in finding the time to shoot him from different angles, or to provide us with much of a look at his face – and when such a shot exists, the expression on that face is almost completely blank. Combined with my previous gripe, it means that simply getting any series of shots in sequence to learn for next time feels slightly more important than using them to build an atmosphere that will impact the audience this time. Given the filmmaker’s capability to construct a captivating world and atmosphere, that is a shame.
Even so, on the balance of things, I do feel this experiment manages to serve up some commendable moments later in its run-time, which do ultimately mean it works as a standalone effort. Not least because, unlike the films which preceded it, this does not take on the format of a succession of sketches (with Don’t Shoot… jumping between a number of absurd and obscene short-scenarios; and Eat the Rich dividing its time describing a number of disgusting capitalist caricatures) – and instead centres on one particular character.
When the nameless individual sits up in bed, he finds that the crumpled sheets around him (already red-flag to any M.R. James fans) have tied themselves into a kind of cotton umbilical – linking his body with the darkness in the next room. With the double-door wide open and no lights inside, the rectangular portal resembles the void of a television screen on standby.
When the character is dragged into the darkness beyond, we then follow him in a scenario which hits us with an unnerving blurring of the fourth-wall. While we distinctly hear a director call “action” on the set of some kind of found-footage horror, when The Horror finally creeps into the image, it is as an explosive, strobing static, which nobody seems to be in control of – before some God-like spotlight follows the character back to his tent, to hide.
A final third scene follows, which, without wanting to spoil things, makes fantastic use of projections to cast a buzzing, signal-less television’s screen across the character – haggard and worn down following earlier events. Meanwhile, the conclusion seems to draw the three vignettes together as a cohesive experimental comment on the toxicity of the medium of television, if not mass-entertainment as a whole.
I won’t go any further into any of that, because it would not be the first time I was probably commenting on things that aren’t necessarily there in an experimental film. But the fact is I would usually be inclined to go off on one (possibly tying Tarkovsky’s Stalker – and the draw of dreams granted by a forbidden, toxic space – into things) on what I thought it was all about – suggesting that while this is a more focused mode of storytelling, it is still filled to the brim with subtext, and jumping-off points for speculation and discussion. Even if Sleep Stalker feels a little rough and ready as Wilson adapts his process to live action, this is still an experiment that is worth a watch in its own right – never mind as part of some greater whole, which I excitedly await.