In Italy, a young boy named Giacomo Gallo can only hide under a bed as he witnesses his mother being stabbed to death by an English horn. He doesn’t see the murderer, who is believed to be a serial killer known as The Dwarf Killer due to his short stature. All he can remember for sure is the blood and a strange hissing sound. Detective Ulisse Moretti (Max von Sydow) promises Giacomo that he will capture the Dwarf Killer.
Twenty years later, Moretti is retired. He never caught the Dwarf Killer, whose killing spree ended just as abruptly as it began. However, when a sex worker named Angela (Barbara Lerici) is brutally murdered on a train, there is evidence that indicates the Dwarf Killer has returned. Moretti comes out of retirement, determined to close the one case that he never solved. Unfortunately, it’s going to be difficult because Moretti’s memory is failing. As he puts it at one point, there are times when he can’t even remember his late wife’s face. Moretti has forgotten much about the case, though as he investigates, it all starts to come back to him. Moretti finds himself working with the now grown-up Giacomo (Stefano Dionisi), who hopes to finally capture the man who killed his mother. And while Moretti may be struggling to remember the past and Giacomo still isn’t quite sure what he saw while hiding under the bed, it soon becomes clear that the killer remembers both of them.
After the disappointingly mean-spirited Phantom of the Opera, Sleepless was a return to form for Dario Argento. The film is a giallo and, in typical Argento fashion, the mystery involves not just the physical clues but also how people interpret and edit their own memories. The hiss that Giacomo heard turns out to be not what he originally believed. The killer also turns out to be something even more disturbing than what the police originally assumed. At the heart of the mystery is a rather morbid nursery verse, the sort of thing that can be either innocent or dangerous depending on how one interprets the words. Sleepless is a throwback to the type of films that made Mario Bava famous and also the type of films with which Argento started his directorial career. Max von Sydow’s Moretti is not just a detective. He’s also a symbol of an aging genre, a reminder of the clever mysteries that shed blood with style without ever losing their essential humanity.
Argento has often been criticized for not getting particularly complex performances from his actors. I don’t think that criticism is always fair. One need only see David Hemmings and Daria Nicolodi in Deep Red or Jessica Harper in Suspiria to see what Argento can do with the right cast. In Sleepless, Max von Sydow gives a strong performance as Moretti. In fact, it’s probably one of the best performances to have ever appeared in an Argento film. He plays Moretti as being a kindly man on a mission, someone who has seen the worst that the world has to offer but who hasn’t given up his soul. Von Sydow gives us someone who we truly care about, which makes the film’s set pieces (which are bloody even by Argento standards) all the more effective.
It’s become a bit of a cliché to claim that Argento went into a decline after Tenebrae. While it’s true that Argento’s post-Opera films have been uneven, Sleepless shows what he was still capable of producing.
The (Reviewed) Films of Dario Argento:
