Sleep has been part of the horror genre repertoire since The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, and the anxieties around it are spiking as the “sleep economy” becomes a thing. This ambitiously structured gore fest about a woman suffering from waking nightmares comes with an all-black cast, but race isn’t a central preoccupation here. Instead, as night terrors burst the banks into reality, debut director James Ross II concentrates on maintaining an appropriately scrambled and claustrophobic experience – perhaps to the detriment of the fear factor.
On her 15th birthday, Riley (Jasmine Mathews) is paralysed in a waking/sleep state at her foster home, able to observe but powerless to intervene to stop a care worker going berserk. Since this massacre, Riley keeps a strict sleep protocol as an adult, making sure anyone under the same roof drops off before her, which apparently protects them from the malevolent presence invading her nights. Old foster home pal David (Stephen Barrington) accepts an invitation to the house where Riley’s dad murdered her mum, but gets the willies when a pallid demon begins manifesting in the small hours. It turns out that Riley’s boyfriend, Cam (RJ Brown), has been lax in letting her fall asleep before him – and now her resident succubus is on the loose again.
The levels of cause and effect, reality and fantasy, in Riley’s dreams are confusing at first: she inhabits the perspective of the eyeball-plucking fiend (a nod to ETA Hoffmann’s Sandman?) and wanders a hellish labyrinth in which past victims are trapped. Thankfully, Ross clarifies everything with a burst of guiding lore in an ingenious third-act switchback that revises the previous two acts.
Despite this sturdy constriction, the film remains only mildly scary – maybe because of the interruptions and vagaries of the complex setup. The middling performances don’t feel extreme enough, and the generic, chalk-faced, taloned bogeyman is a mere stain on Freddy Krueger’s jersey. But there is an undeniable astuteness and agility in the storytelling here on which Ross can build.
• Parasomnia is on Shudder and AMC+ from 4 September.
