From April 25, in cinemas you can watch a paranoid thriller with elements of the horror film “Claustrophobes: No Sleep”. This is the feature directorial debut of Irishman Ian Hunt-Duffy. In the review below we tell you whether viewers will fall asleep while watching the tape.
Pros:
some really tense moments; from the technical side, decent performance; the creators are at least trying to surprise
Minuses:
secondary uninteresting plot with uninteresting characters about an uninteresting experiment
“Claustrophobia: No Sleep” / Double Blind
Genre thriller, horror
Director Ian Gant-Duffy
Starring: Millie Brady, Pollyanna Mackintosh, Akshay Kumar, Brenock O’Connor, Dirmud Noyce, Abbie Fitz
Premiere cinemas
Year of release 2023
IMDb website
Seven young people, three girls and four guys whose names you won’t remember anyway, agree to test a new drug from a pharmaceutical company whose name has no meaning. For five days, subjects will be fed mystery pills that may cause them to experience certain side effects.
Over time, the stern-looking, taciturn aunt in a snow-white robe slightly increases the dose, which is why each of the participants in this dubious experiment begins to suffer from insomnia. But even this could have been tolerated if one day the most talkative of the girls had not fallen silent forever, floundering on the floor with a bloody face in an epileptic fit. The situation is complicated by the fact that the laboratory is closing for the next 24 hours, and each of the incredible six is already literally dripping with eyelids. “Claustrophobes: No Sleep,” and it’s hard to wrap your head around it, has a 100% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, although based on only 8 reviews from film critics. This formally amazing result, which, for example, films such as “Citizen Kane” (99%) or “The Godfather” (97%) does not reach, can only be believed with the thought that all local actors were locked in a terrible bunker and promised to release it only after writing an approving review of this movie. It is simply impossible to explain this perception of the Irish novelty otherwise.
At its core, the film is close to the low-budget thrillers that have been especially popular in the last decade, inspired by the Saw franchise, about bizarre quest rooms and mysterious experiments in enclosed spaces (Claustrophobia, Deadly Labyrinth), from which doomed fools are trying to escape. Therefore, everything here is very secondary and practically devoid of any maneuvers for pleasant surprises. What do the creators of these bloody entertainments usually offer on the screen? A group consisting of varying degrees of marginalized or simply stupid characters (after all, normal people, as a rule, do not end up in such places) finds themselves in a death trap. The initiative is taken by an informal leader who will definitely reach the end of the test and will want to expose the organizers of the nightmare games. Someone must definitely be under suspicion due to speculation that he is a “sent Cossack”. Someone is likely to be burned alive.
Only if films of this kind can boast at least a variety of puzzle traps (at which John Kramer would probably laugh a lot), then “Claustrophobes: No Sleep” is deprived of even this modest component.
Its authors rely primarily on a paranoid atmosphere of hopelessness, when the catastrophically sleep-deprived characters have ceased to understand where reality is and where it is a hallucination. Despite the fact that the viewer is absolutely indifferent to these unfamiliar and, let’s be honest, not very pleasant people, watching their senseless darting along the sterile clean corridors is just plain boring.
In rare moments, Ian Hunt-Duffy, together with debut screenwriter Narayan van Male, manages to create suspense through some tense situations. But this animation looks more like cinematic somnambulism than serious attempts to make the viewer sit back in their chair, or even more so, to frighten them.
At the same time, neither the symmetry of the frame, nor the expressively cold color scheme, which sometimes is interrupted by aggressive red, nor the game with the depth of field of the frame or special angles designed to convey the bad state of the characters, are capable of qualitatively improving an essentially weak plot with barely alive intrigue.
There is nothing really to say about the performers, these unlucky victims of the experiment look so faded, who are shamelessly compared with ordinary laboratory rodents.
It seems as if these unfortunate people have found themselves in the ominous “Anthill” of the Umbrella corporation (a useless fire ax even appears in the frame), only instead of white symbolic rabbits there are mice and a monster can jump out from around the corner only in a dream. What stands out from all the gray mass is Polyanna McIntosh, who could be seen in the recent “The Walking Dead”, but her presence is criminally small.
In the 80s, when the heroes of one famous horror movie fell asleep, a mad maniac with burnt skin in a dirty sweater appeared to them and pierced the poor fellows with blades on the infernal glove, which eventually gave rise to a whole cult. Modern “Claustrophobes: No Sleep”, despite the identical option for the characters – you should never sleep, will perfectly pass for a reliable sleeping pill. So, sweet dreams everyone.
Conclusion:
“Claustrophobes: No Sleep” is a very mediocre thriller and a very weak horror film.
