Director Pavel Khvaleev’s nightmarish torture flick, Sleepless Beauty (2020), is a gritty and haunting thiller, full of macabre imagery, terrifying situations, and blood-curdling screams from its leading — and bloody — lady, Polina Davydova. The film is very dark, both in premise and sometimes in lighting, and its bitterly written ending satisfyingly subverted my expectations. However, despite the movie’s very dark premise, somehow Khvaleev allowed room for humor to seep in, primarily by him smartly directing the nonchalant mannerisms of the kidnapper and juxtaposing him with the horrified and screaming Polina Davydova as Mila — a sign of Khvaleev’s well-rounded directorial style.

In Sleepless Beauty, a young woman named Mila (Polina Davydova) is suddenly kidnapped from her apartment, and upon waking, finds that she is being held in a room with no way out. The room is equipped with cameras and a loudspeaker, through which one of her captors communicates that Mila is to perform tasks to stay alive, and also, will never be allowed to sleep. A masked man continually torments her, periodically appearing to oversee her task performances and to punish her if need be for the salivating audience of online viewers. While she is missing, her worried parents launch an investigation into her whereabouts, not knowing that their daughter is being irrevocably changed through a twisted psychological experiment.

Sleepless Beauty has the strange disconnect that a movie with dubbing typically has — personally, I would rather read subtitles. Line delivery seemed abrupt and emotionless at times as a result, but eventually, that ended up matching the somewhat techno-focused movie. In the beginning, the point of view was through what look like traffic or satellite cameras, instilling a sickening feeling of stalking the subject, Mila, right along with the sinister abductors of the movie. Afterward, more cinematic camera work took over, getting up close and personal with the prisoner, but never went far enough to capture the claustrophobic situation.

For the premise of kidnapping and torturing for the audience’s pleasure, I thought the movie would be much bloodier and gorier — the camera often looked away during shots that would foot the blood bill, only to cut back in for the aftermath, making the whole torture aspect of the film not very effective. At the very least, Polina Davydova as Mila made for a stellar scream queen. At the top of the final third of the film, an artfully shot dream-fantasy signaled the entrance of some of the most grotesque and random imagery I have ever seen strung together, like something out of The Garden of Earthly Delights painting. Hats off to Animator Jacov Ivanusa for this 5-minute gem of a sequence, which signaled that the better parts of the film were to come. In its final throes, the film became more of a psychological character study, one that was thrilling and totally engrossing to watch, in contrast to the first two-thirds of the film.

In the end, Sleepless Beauty feels like another torture porn movie, where the pretty ingenue stands in for the screenwriter’s and/or audience’s fantasy of having a play-thing at their disposal — like a Hostel movie that is lighter on the gore factor, dragging bodies out of the torture room like some failed Vaudeville act. I ended up being more interested in the story and characters from the subplot of investigating Mila’s disappearance and might have enjoyed seeing that crime thriller at the forefront than the torture-light feature that I got. This psychological-horror will be available on November 11th via VOD and digital platforms.

6 out of 10