Directed by: Rodney Ascher.
Rodney
Ascher’s last film, Room 237, was a brilliant documentary about a number of
people obsessed with Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. That film plunges us into
their minds – as the entire film is just them talking over clips from the
movie, and contains perspective outside the people who are describing what they
believe The Shining is “really” about. Some (including Stephen King, and many
associated with Kubrick) seem to have misunderstood the film – as Ascher wasn’t
advocating any of the crazy theories on display, but instead was making a movie
about the obsession the viewers have with The Shining – and the dangers of
overanalyzing something.
His
new documentary, The Nightmare, tries something similar. This is a documentary
about “sleep paralysis”, a condition where people awake paralyzed in their bed.
To make matters worse, they experience visions – surprisingly consistent – of
dark, shadowy figures who, according to those interviewed – may just scare
them, although one woman says she was raped one of these shadowy figures.
Ascher interviews several people who suffer from the illness – shooting them at
often odd angles, and then recreating the nightmarish visions they had. Once
again, Ascher doesn’t provide any outside narration in the film – no doctors
explaining the condition. Just several of sufferers themselves, telling their
stories. What you make of them is up to you.
If
nothing else, The Nightmare proves that Ascher could direct a great horror
movie if he wanted to. The recreations of the nightmarish visions the subjects
of the documentary have are its best part – atmospheric and scary. They brought
to mind last year’s brilliant The Babadook – which isn’t a bad thing. Even the
interviews themselves help to create the atmosphere of the movie. Ascher
doesn’t shoot them in standard documentary style – instead using oft-kilter
angles and strange camera placement. Ascher isn’t interested in making a
typical documentary with The Nightmare – and at its best he succeeds. What
Ascher – who has suffered from sleep paralysis himself – really wants to do, is
place the audience in the headspace of the people who suffer from this – to
make them realize how terrifying it really can be. In that, he succeeds.
Yet, in other areas, The Nightmare doesn’t really work
that well at all. For one things, the film is awfully repetitive – as not only
do the individual’s visions often repeat themselves, they are very similar to
everyone else’s visions as well. For another, pretty much everyone in the
documentary dismisses all possibility that the condition is psychological – or
at least not purely so – and talk about something larger. Yes, I know that
providing some expert narration on what we know about this condition goes
against Ascher`s style – but in this, I really think it could have helped. By
the end of The Nightmare, I feel I know a lot about what it’s like to suffer
from sleep paralysis, but no idea what actually causes it – or really, what it
is.
Room 237 was a great doc, and The Nightmare is not –
yet it still clearly shows why Ascher is one of the documentary filmmaker working
right know to keep an eye on. He is an interesting documentary filmmaker – one of
the few who really does think of style as much as content – and he has an
interesting strategy, of placing the audience in the headspace of someone they
really do not want to be inside. The Nightmare is a passable doc – not much
more – but it’s been made in a style that makes up for its shortcomings.
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