“Watch Me Sleep” Now Available on DVD!
After the death of his abusive mother, recovering alcoholic Sean returns to his hometown with ulterior motives other than attend her funeral. He hires a webcam company service to install a camera inside her coffin to ensure that his mother, who would repeated micro-stab him in the back with knives, is, in fact, dead. As he struggles with his addiction and plagued by nightmares of random occult images involving his mother, Sean can barely hold it together to watch the video fee but when he does, what he sees often horrifies him – a rotting skeletal corpse with maggots, brief movements caught in a glimpse, and even her staring right back at him. He implores a town friend to check his sanity, but all seems normal as normal can be with a coffin-cam facing directly at a corpse. As the nightmares intensify, a presence takes hold of Sean, a familiar presence that hasn’t terrified him since he was a child.
“Watch Me Sleep” might sound like a ploy phrase your kids would say to get you to stay with them at night or during nap time but for John Williams – the director of the 2023 film and not the “Jaws” and “Star Wars” composer – the lingering effect of trauma can be a powerful, often adjacent to being supernaturally scary, and is nowhere near being child’s play. The director of 2015’s “The Slayers” and “Creatures of the Night” writes and directs the British voyeuristic graveside thriller that concentrates on the lasting aftermath effects of trauma despite our past being buried six feet underground. Filmed in Staffordshire England, “Watch Me Sleep” is an independent production with Williams and Claire Ward as their third production together since 2021, behind “Creatures of the Night” and “There Something in the Shadows,” and executive producer Volker Plassmann, producer behind “Next Door” and “The Beast of Riverside Hallow.”
Small production equals small cast but that doesn’t equate to poor performance as “Watch Me Sleep’s” cast is brilliant within the oversimplification explanation of the plotline which is more or less a traumatized man obsessed with watching his dead mother on camera to ensure she stays dead. That doesn’t sound too exciting but with the actors’ performances and with Williams evolving of the plot to keep Sean’s sanity teetering on edge, “Watch Me Sleep” is more fleshed out with richer than expected character backstory and development of Sean, played intently and without hesitation by William’s go-to actor Darren McAree, and his problems with alcohol, a tormented childhood, and his blinding spite for his mother. Mum is played by Sarah Wynne Kordas in a dialogue-free peripheral of psychological spookiness as a lifeless head on a webcam for most of the picture but is able to shine in the shadows of Sean’s vivid imagination and be diabolically on point when that lifeless head moves unexpectedly in a not-so-subtle manner for the chill and thrill triggered moments. While the mum is certainly a presence, Sean is basically a one-man show of bopping between his struggles with drinking, his affliction of nightmares, his hesitation of webcam voyeurism, and trying to blow off steam and showcase his questionable sanity to townie friend Tom (James Whitehurst, “Creature of the Night”) who humors his friend’s hysteria with rather tranquil patience that is unusual. The rest of the characters support where needed with brief interactions surrounding Sean’s cam setup and AA meetings with Zane Hopkins (“The Beast of Riverside Hollow”), Steve Wood (“Cannibals and Carpet Fitters’), Charles O’Neill (“The Jack in the Box Rises”), Katie Elliff, and David Tunstall (“Beyond the Witching Hour”) as a mysterious man once friend to Sean’s mother.
Despite the budget and some unpolished areas, there’s surprisingly more bang for your buck in “Watch Me Sleep” with a thrilling storyline that houses competent performances, editing, and one hell of a movie magic accomplishment in its special effects. The black and white dream sequences of randomized occult and supernatural imagery are reminiscent of “Ringu’s” the contents of VHS tape with more visceral sound design to give it a lasting, haunting discord and the editing done an all accounts of these dreams are spliced perfectly into Sean’s sleeping and waking nightmares. Between this reoccurring onslaught of mixt pernicious phantasmagoria and the out of left field special effects that reap the success for “Watch Me Sleep,” John Williams’ little English film is a bit a sleeper itself we should watch in a statement that’s ironically punned. Keeping it mysteriously ambiguous, Williams doesn’t define the context that is kept open to be obscure and confusing for Sean who’s trying to pieces his dreams, evidence, and his mother’s curious connections together, a puzzle that could be an explanation why she tortured him with a knife, but the gist of the story delves into the occult as his mother dabbled in ritual and paganistic indoctrinations in the layer much more satanists or demonology driven. Yet, those details are never verbal explained and that keeps you guessing whether his mum had dark dealings with the Devil or is the trauma, stress, and alcohol withdraw doing a number on his fractured psyche.
You never know what kind of film you’re going to unearth at Wild Eye Releasing with its mysterious grab bag of horror schlock and independent ambition. There have been titles of questionable taste that not even the sleaziest or gorehound fans would touch with a ten foot pole, but titles like the now out-of-print first-person-shooter occult-actioner “Hotel Inferno” and the satirical crude-humor of “Race Wars: The Remake” are absolute low-budget gold held in high esteem. “Watch Me Sleep” ranks up in that small layered stratosphere for the company who releases it on DVD. The MPEG2 encoded DVD5 leaves much on the table technically with fuzzy detail on its standard 720p definition. There’s no intricate picture quality nor does it have textural achievement but what you see is what you get, a picture constant and watchable B-horror you may catch on USA’s Up All Night hosted by Rhonda Shear and guest starring Gilbert Godfrey on cable television, broadcasting in analog through a tube set. I will say the special effects are damn good for money and with no signs of how they’re achieved, such as wires, CGI, nor other. The UK English language PCM Stereo 2.0 has its problems as well with a boxy, depth-less dual channel output that has a subtle layer of interference static, likely due to inexperience or poor equipment, but the dialogue track remains front and center with prominence and the sound design, the jarring clicks and pops along with the discord sounds of Sean’s nightmares and the overall brooding score, shoulders a lot of the weight by carrying the film’s technical problems. There are no available subtitles. Bonus features include only an image gallery, the trailer, and other Wild Eye Releasing previews. The clear DVD Amaray comes with Wild Eye Releasing’s on brand exaggerated artistic rendition of an intense and scary old woman emerging from her coffin. It’s a bit hyperbolic but eye-catching. The reversible sleep has a sheet spanning, bloody depicted still from the film and no other bonus inserts. The region free DVD is not rated and has encoded a 91-minute runtime.
Last Rites: Definitely one Wild Eye Releasing titles to pick up and enjoy, “Watch Me Sleep” has mother issues, alcoholic issues, trust issues, relationship issues, paranoia issues, and supernatural issues in what is a sleeper hit from the writer-director John Williams.
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