Sleep Has Her House

I caught this film running on a loop at a friends place which I later on was able to watch alone. A warning; If you happen, as a movie go-er, to have any narrative expectations, don't bother. It is a series of slow moving clips without a direction and certainly doesn't deserve the high rating it has.

What I liked was the cinematography and sound. Chris Barley certainly has a great talent for it and I would be curious to see him collaborating with directors who can utilize this.

Yes, It depends how you want to express your art. If this rocks the filmmaker's boat and there are people who enjoy it, perfect. There are very few people left who are able to let their work be art.

However, cinema it is not. Cinema or movies do take people by the hand. It always offers them a narrative however strange and confusing it may be. Even David Lynch and Lars von Trier are aware of this.

The 'art' of cinema is to combine different forms (story, sound, music, image, acting, et cetera) under one creative vision.

Like I said, if the film is an expression of the filmmaker, fine. However, if the filmmaker is proposing to say; well, here is a series of slowly but beautiful moving clips, so what does it mean to you? It is a bit lazy and even a bit insulting for 1 and 1/2 hours.

This film would be wonderful as video art in a gallery. That would be definitely its niche. However, since it is on IMBD as a movie, I think the viewer deserve a small narrative which I placed as in the title of my review.

During the early moments of Sleep Has Her House, you get the feeling that something will eventually jump at you, but you quickly learn that this is not that kind of film. Sleep Has Her House is a film of extreme subjectivity as the viewer is concerned. With its sounds and images, it evokes emotions, ideas, and -most of all in my case- memories and wonderment.

It is composed of images that exist in a state of both motion and stillness at once, they seem to constantly expand and shrink. Objects and places slowly revealing themselves to you, except, is it really what you think it is? Images morphing into different things based on space, distance and light. But that's all just a description. What this work forces you to do, is to bring your own experience, and your own emotions to it. While the images and the sounds navigate you through them. There's a moment where it all goes to black, and stars slowly emerge from the darkness, alive and breathing, with beautiful and ethereal music, which suddenly cuts to what I perceive to be the heavens, driving me to shift my thinking to something higher, much higher than what I was bringing. And as soon as it lifted me, it dropped me back to it's pit. It's one of the most moving things I've ever seen in a film.

I know the filmmaker was partially inspired by Scott Walker and Grouper, and it's truly fascinating how the influence of those sound artists is obvious on the images of the film.

Sleep Has Her House doesn't aim to pass your time, but rather make you feel and live every minute of its running time. This is a great, highly experimental film, with a meticulous sound design that's inseparable from its images.

...more an unforgettable experience than a film. It is nothing you just can watch with friends and chat and check your phone etc. I would strongly recommend to see it alone with no distraction and handle it a bit like a meditation. Give it it's time and stay tuned what your mind will show you!

Mind-numbing think piece.

This kinda works just like hypnosis...it does its job only if you allow it, if you go with it. And you have to do a lot of preparation in order to work. You have to see this in pitch black, not during the day, but late at night. You have to let your mind wander and fill in the blanks. Basically, this is the reason I don't like it. It's a minimal effort from the director. He just crops up some barely visible stills (some with movement) with sound effects and you have to do the story, and make it on the spot. I get it. Some will like that.

The LB rating shows that this platform is filled with people who desperately try to find meaning in nothing, pretentious people. And Scott did this service for them. Those people finished all cinema and now try to search for meaning in anti-cinema, which this film clearly is. You can keep it.

This is worse than Last and First Men.

Content more suitable for a audio/visual exhibit, digital displays or projectors +/- sound, not cinema. I suspect the director just had a bunch of pictures and footage and thought "hey why not throw this together and call this a film?" - and so they did. This is the sort of movie that makes you question if there is an idea, a thought behind the imagery and atmosphere, or just poor planning and laziness. This is more akin to a PowerPoint presentation than a movie. The nature depicted in the images is gorgeous and sadly struggling for meaning or purpose. If you have run out of things to watch go to YouTube instead.