Method
actors can be pretentious and annoying, but Alma Böhm’s method is downright
dangerous. She has her actors stay up for days straight, in order to strip away
their self-conscious selves and unleash their pure instinct—or something like
that. Needless to say, this is a bad idea in a horror movie kind of way.
Staging their performance in abandoned mental hospital further compounds the
danger in Gustavo Hernández’s You Shall
Not Sleep (trailer
here),
which screens during the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival.
Bianca
has also been fascinated by Böhm’s work, so she can’t no when offered a part in
her latest theatrical happening, even though she is well aware of the infamous
ending to her last attempt at sleep-deprivation theater (apparently, 108 hours
is a significant red line for participants). However, she is rather put out to
learn she still has to compete for the role, against her pretty but less
talented friend Dora.
The
good news is she is much more susceptible to Böhm’s method than Dora. That is
also the bad news. Before long, Bianca is seeing shadowy figures out of the
corner of her eye and having flashbacks from the POV of her character, a
wronged patient who very nearly killed her baby when she set the hospital on
fire.
Pretty
soon, we are just as lost as Bianca in the various temporal shift and reality
warps. Yet, there always seems to be a method to Hernández’s madness, so to
speak. Frankly, YSNS is probably a horror
movie by default (it would certainly be terrifying to live through equivalent experiences),
but it has nearly as much in common with mind-benders like Inception. Still, it is hard to argue with the implication of a
haunted and crumbling lunatic asylum.
The
Uruguayan Hernández shows a masterful control of atmosphere, tension, and
general mise-en-scene throughout it all. This is definitely a moody movie. He
also gets some great performances from his cast, particularly Spanish actress
Belén Rueda, who goes from being the woman-in-jeopardy in Julia’s Eyes, to being the one putting women in jeopardy, as Böhm.
She is chillingly driven, sharing a kinship with Peter O’Toole in The Stunt Man. It is also scary to see
how worn-down and hollowed-out Eva De Dominici gets as the tragically sensitive
Bianca, while Susana Hornos really sneaks up on viewers as the dramatically
less intuitive Dora.
