Sleepless

Dummy Hand

Sleepless
aka Nonhosonno
Directed by Dario Argento
Italy 2001 Medusa
BFI Screening NFT 3
Saturday 27th May 2023

Warning: Very slight spoilers

So, of all the films playing in the Dario Argento season at the NFT in May 2023, I just picked two movies (finances allowing) to revisit in the season... ones which I knew I’d not seen at a cinema before. So I got to see The Stendhal Syndrome (reviewed here) on a big screen and also this one, Sleepless (aka Nonhossono). Both of these I’d only seen via my old DVD copies and I have to say that, though I enjoyed both back in the day, I really liked seeing them as part of a proper cinema experience so much more.

I seem to remember (perhaps my memory is poor but, if it is, remind me in the comments below) that the film wasn’t particularly well received when it got a video release over here in the UK (I don’t think it got to our cinemas or I would have been straight on it but, the internet wasn’t as pervasive as it is these days). I couldn’t see what the problem was myself... I loved it then and, now I’ve revisited it in a more appropriate venue, I love it now.

The film follows the return to Italy of a killer, thought to have perished in a string of murders against women in the late 1980s. The Dwarf Killer, as he came to be known, was foiled by homicide detective Morretti, played by this movie’s big star, the always incredible Max von Sydow. We see Moretti back then, after a woman has been brutally murdered with an oboe, as he makes a promise to the son, Giacomo, who half witnessed the crime, that he would bring the killer to justice even if it takes him a lifetime. 17 years later, the boy grows up to be actor Stefano Dionisi and he gravitates back to Turin when a series of similar murders take place. 

But, back in the 80s, the dwarf seemingly responsible for the killings was found murdered by an unknown assailant and the crimes came to an end. The police ask the now retired Moretti to help them with his memories of the case and, somehow, he and Giacomo start working the case privately, without official police sanction, to try and figure out why the seemingly dead killer has now returned. Is it a ghost? A copy cat? What’s going on?

And it’s a great movie with Argento absolutely at the top of his game here. There’s the usual great cinematography and the murder set pieces he’s known for and it’s full of visual gems. For example, when a prostitute, who soon becomes a victim in an intense night train stalk and slash sequence, answers the telephone to a client, Argento does some incredible work in the choice of shots and editing. As she talks we get exaggerated close ups of parts of her face isolated and cut together... eye, mouths, ear and back and forth and so on. It’s almost like looking at a cubist painting but only focussing on just one of the fragments of a person’s face at any given moment. It’s a really interesting visual approach and it creates a shorthand summation of the emotional state of the character. Honestly, it would have been nice to see more of this idea explored throughout the film but, I was only conscious of the director employing this technique in this one scene here.

Another interesting moment is of a strip of red carpet in a long corridor in a ballet venue, which the camera tracks in close up, looking down but parallel with the carpet so we just see things like people’s feet walking along and vacuum cleaner heads etc. A long journey through a long section, culminating in, eventually, leaving the carpet to join a killing in progress... the decapitated head falling into the frame from above. It’s all good stuff and in many ways the film almost feels like a compilation or ‘greatest hits’ tape of early Argento signature moments.

For instance, there are a few sequences where he pitches bright Bava-like lighting styles against each other. A single flash of blink and you’ll miss it red in the chase through the train near the start of the picture, for instance. Or a dance club where the large double level floorspace is clearly delineated in the frame by green, red and purple lit sections like it’s almost riffing on Suspiria (reviewed here) or Inferno (reviewed here).

The killings themselves seem almost reminiscent of Argento's early screen kills too... some of them definitely reminded my of those in Deep Red (reviewed here) for example. I don’t know if this was a conscious decision or not but one of the story mechanics used to mask the identity of the killer, using a ventriloquist’s dummy, is almost like a rationalisation to one of the more notoriously non-sequitur moments of that earlier film, invoking the ‘mad puppet’, it seems to me. Also, the idea of an old timer coming out of retirement to help catch the killer seems to me like a riff on the Karl Malden character in Argento’s Cat O’ Nine Tails (reviewed here), just a little.

The film even includes a few scenes with famous giallo damsel Rosella Falk, who many readers may remember in such gialli as The Fifth Cord, Black Belly Of The Tarantula, Seven Blood-Stained Orchids and The Killer Is On The Phone. You may also remember her from Fellini’s 8 1/2 and Modesty Blaise (reviewed here). So it’s nice to see an actress associated with the genre popping up in a move by the king of giallo.

To further infuse the film with a ‘the gangs all here and making classic Argento’ feel is the return of the group Goblin on musical chores. My understanding is that, after splitting up under bad circumstances years before, the band reformed to score this movie and... promptly split up again for good (in this incarnation) due to their differences once the score was complete. Our loss because, honestly, it’s a classic Goblin score, one of their best as far as I’m concerned. So yeah, this film ‘sounds’ like an Argento classic as well as just looking like it.

Other points of interest are Max von Sydow insisting his parrot in the movie be named Marcello, after his friend Marcello Mastroianni and the fact that the poem about farm yard animal killings which the murderer uses as a playbook, was written by Argento’s daughter, Asia.

If I had any grumbles about the movie it would be the slightly clunky animatronic heads used in two of the murders (but that’s still preferable to using CGI effects, for sure) and the completely ‘out of nowhere’ moment when the killer is shot in such a way that the person shooting him from a different location would be completely unjustified in doing so and it just feels like a bizarrely miraculous way to get the surviving protagonists out of harms way. But these are minor complaints for such a well made giallo as this, it has to be said.

Just like the planned sequel to Argento’s The Stendhal Syndrome was transformed into non-sequel The Card Player, so too was the original planned sequel to this film, dropped due to financing issues,  rewritten and then recycled into Argento’s latest movie, which retained the original proposed title Occhiali Neri (aka Dark Sunglasses)... you can find my review of that one here.

All in all, I really enjoyed seeing Sleepless again and it needs a full bells and whistles Blu Ray release as far as I’m concerned (along with other, later Argento opuses). It’s easily the best of Argento’s 21st Century made movies, to date... and needs to be seen more. An absolute belter.