Ten years later (in 1984), another young actress is approached by Bohm’s representative. Later, we realize she’s an actress (Maria Zabay as Marlene) experiencing waking nightmares under the influence of sleep deprivation that stage director Alma Bohm (Belen Rueda) has decided will result in some higher artistic “truth.” A woman hiding in a wardrobe emerges to be menaced by specters in an apartment. The improved production resources certainly result in a handsome product, particularly in an opening sequence (as well as some later ones) all cast in eerie blues. In outline, at least, “Sleep” appears cut from the same conceptual cloth as the director’s prior work, in which dreams, hallucinations, insanity, and the supernatural were difficult for the protagonists (and viewer) to separate. That shouldn’t hurt its commercial prospects (it’s already opened in some South American countries and sold to other territories), but one hopes Hernandez regains some degree of creative idiosyncrasy in the future. No-budget “Casa Muda” had a clammy, ominous atmosphere “We Shall Not Sleep,” despite good art direction and an abandoned-asylum setting, feels like a convoluted and inorganic rehash of horror tropes from the start. remake “Silent House” two years later, that illusion was accomplished via some editorial sleight-of-hand.) Now, with his third feature, “You Shall Not Sleep,” Hernandez moves into the mainstream of Spanish-language genre cinema, with a budget to match, but theresult is too glossy, contrived, and dependent on rote jump scares to raise much of a fright. (Actually, as with its less-well-received U.S. Uruguayan director Gustavo Hernandez made a splash in 2010 with “La casa muda,” a haunted-house thriller with the conceptual novelty of being ostensibly shot in a single, real-time take.
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