As sub-genres of horror go, torture porn certainly isn’t for everyone. With it’s extreme presentation of visceral brutality and often poorly fleshed out stories-as-pretense, these films can be difficult for broad audiences to swallow. When the filmmakers are talented enough or the premises are ridiculous enough, a particular entry might rise above the morass and become part of the popular lexicon (looking at you, Human Centipede), but most amount to little more than questionably necessary exercises in self-abuse for the viewer. The new Russian horror film Sleepless Beauty falls decidedly into the second category. With a story that is weak to the point of non-existent, the film is comprised almost exclusively by scenes of a woman being tortured. And while there are definitely moments of graphic pain that will leave viewers shocked and squirming, there’s almost nothing else to make the experience feel worthwhile when it comes to its merciful conclusion.
The setup for Sleepless Beauty is fairly simple, yet somehow still manages to come off as unnecessarily confusing: some unidentified group wants some ambassador’s wife to kill her husband for some reason that’s probably political or whatever. To this end, they are experimenting with a new assassination technique. The subject of the experiment is a young woman named Mila (Polina Davydova), who spends far too much time in the opening scenes pumping gas and buying fish before getting kidnapped by a masked man (Evgeniy Gagarin), who takes her to a dingy, industrial basement. Shortly after her arrival, a voice comes in over the loudspeaker to explain the rules of her captivity: there will be no sleeping, and her days will be rigorously segmented into such blocks as Morning Routine, Exercise, Morning Activities, Entertainment, and Virtual Reality Immersion. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to Mila, the entire experiment will be live-streamed to some dark web chat room where the administrators can comment on their progress, and other sick randos can provide the sort of deranged stream-of-consciousness nattering and vitriol that you might see on your average YouTube video of a six-year-old’s birthday party.
Once the basics are established, we discover that pretty much all the parts of Mila’s day are really just different forms of torture. A voice on the loudspeaker purporting to be her aborted child orders her to fish a baby doll out of a bucket of human remains. She is forced to play a trivia game against an opponent with a sack over her head in which the loser is killed. She’s placed in a coffin full of rats. And so on and so forth until the combination of sleeplessness and trauma leave her a quivering, speechless mess who will kill anyone she is placed in a room with. Or something.
Verdict: 1 out of 5 stars:
While fans of the torture porn horror genre may get a thrill out of some of the more horrifying moments, even they will be bored by most of the filler, of which there is plenty. Absolutely no one should ever be subjected to this movie, unless they are actively being held captive in a basement while being subjected to psychological torture, and even then they should only do so under extreme protest.