Actor/writer/director Brady Corbet, star of Antonio Campros’s dark character drama Simon Killer – nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at 2012’s Sundance Film Festival – follows up with this years entry, The Sleepwalker, which was co-written with director Mona Fastvold.
The Sleepwalker focuses on two sisters who are entangled by a secret. Gitte Witt (The Impossible) stars as Kaira, who along with her boyfriend Andrew, played by Christopher Abbott (Marcy, Marcy, May Marlene and TV’s Girls) is enjoying renovating her family’s old and secluded Le-Corbusier style estate in Massachusetts. When her sister Christine arrives (Stephanie Ellis of Men In Black 3) along with fiancee Ira, played by Corbet, tensions and old childhood patterns start to unravel. After violent disruptions, one of the players goes missing.
In her feature debut, director Mona Fastvold visually and aurally creates a destabilizing atmosphere, lulling us into the unraveling sisters’ fractured experience of the world. The art direction enhances this dreamy, but unsettling, mood, juxtaposing the sharp exterior angles and the interior decay of the house with its idyllic wooded surroundings. A study in contrasts between Christine’s raging brokenness and Kaia’s repression, Ira’s mild-mannered propriety and Andrew’s bitter blue-collar machismo, The Sleepwalker weaves these compounding clashes into a powerful portrait of the battle to separate the young women’s personal fictions from realities.
Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold also collaborated on the script for Corbet’s upcoming directorial debut, Childhood Of A Leader, starring Robert Pattinson, Tim Roth and Juliette Binoche.
Leave a Comment