Crew
Director – Laura Alvea, Screenplay – Marta Armengol, Daniel Gonzalez & Miguel Ibañez Monroy with the Collaboration of Laura Alvea, Producers – Olmo Figueredo Gonzalez-Quevedo, Marta Ramirez & Carlos Rosado Sibon, Photography – Fran Fernandez-Pardo Aec, Music – Alfred Tapscott, Visual Effects Supervisor – Amparo Martinez Barco, Special Effects Supervisors – Mariano Garcia Marty & Jon Serrano, Production Design – Sergio Mauriño. Production Company – La Cruda Realidad/La Mujer Dormida AIE/Film Gate/La Claqueta/Coming Soon.
Cast
Almudena Amor (Ana), Javier Rey (Agustin), Amanda Goldsmith (Sara Arias), Yanely Hernandez (Manuela), Pino Montesdeoca (Sofia), Alicia Lobo (Marta)
Plot
Ana travels to an island to take a position working as a nurse for Agustin, tending his wife Sara who is in a comatose state. As she settles in, Ana experiences blank periods where she wakes up with no idea how she got there. At first, she thinks she is sleepwalking and seeks medication to deal with this. She and Agustin become closer and then lovers. However, as the blackout periods increase, Ana believes that Sara is somehow taking control of her body.
The Sleeping Woman was the fourth film from Spanish director Laura Alvea. Alvea had previously co-directed The Extraordinary Tales of the Times Table (2013), the horror film Animas (2018) and the documentary Fernando Torres: The Last Symbol (2020), all with Jose Ortuno. The Sleeping Woman was her first solo film as director.
The film’s initial set-up reminded me a great deal of I Walked with a Zombie (1943) – nurse goes to an island to tend a comatose wife where she forms an attraction to the husband. Things differ after that point – in I Walked we saw the nurse delving into voodoo as a means of saving the wife, in The Sleeping Woman the wife starts to exert some form of Mind Control and the nurse starts experiencing blackout periods and ends up places or doing things with no idea how she got there. The other work that you are reminded of somewhat is the Australian Patrick (1978) with its comatose patient exerting psychic influence and becoming jealous of his nurse from his bed – that maybe combined with a body predation plot.
I quite liked The Sleeping Woman as it started out. Laura Alvea’s direction was slow and deliberate. Leads Almudena Amor and Javier Rey strike up a convincing connection. It didn’t take too much to guess the directions that the story is heading, while the explanation for what is going on seems obvious, but the mood is well sustained.
However, the point where Alvea starts throwing twists on these expectations is when The Sleeping Woman starts to narratively fragment. [PLOT SPOILERS] The twist becomes that the wife is not the sinister party but in fact the husband who has been up to no good. Here however it is never exactly clear what it is that the husband did to the wife, which seems a major omission given that the film’s twist is dependent on it. It also seems a major wrench of sympathies to go from the wife as a sinister figure who is taking over Almudena Amor’s mind at regular intervals to suddenly regard her actions as benevolent (although the end twist reveals that such is not the case after all).
Trailer here