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.
